New MB for Dimesion 3000

[joshuasamson]

My Fiancee has a Dimension 3000 that is a great little machine. The system has like a 2.99 ghz processor and 512mb Ram. The only problem is she is wanting to game now. I would like to avoid buying a new sysytem all together by hopefully finding a MB that will fit and take the same memory as the current system and then just buy a AGP or PCI-E video card and be done with it. may even upgrade her to 1.5 GB or Ram. I know this sounds stupid I am just trying to cut corners here and have not been impressed by what some have said about the PCI video cards.

 

[Surkitz]

do you know what kind of gaming she is wanting to do? you can still get away with a good pci card for games, maybe not so much on the visually enhanced games but still. the ati x1300 is probably the best pci card before you make the jump to agp/pci-e. you have enough processor power, maybe add another 512mb for 1gig total.

 

[joshuasamson]

Well it is actually for both of us and we play Warcraft (her) and BF2. She also likes alot of sports/ action games.

 

[vnf4ultra]

I put a gigabyte 8IG1000MK in my dell 2300(same case design). It's one of the best that will work with the parts in your system, but isn't readily available anymore. You need a micro atx motherboard that supports socket 478 and has ddr sdram as well as an agp (or pci-e if you can find one, very, very few matx 478 boards were made with pci-e).
I've heard the asus p4p800-vm is very good as well, but again, somewhat hard to find.

Boards like this are getting hard to find.
Newegg has only 2 that seem decent any more.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813123008
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813138262

It isn't too hard to put a new board in, but can take some time to do.
My biggest problem was getting the front usb to work(still haven't figured out the front audio).