The £500-£600 PC Challenge thread... Help with choosing a motherboard/CPU combo

DevilGoesDown2Bristol

Hiya folks,

Thanks very much for all of your assistance so far. I'm very nearly there with the spec, which I will post in full here just as soon as I'm done. However, I've just been looking at motherboards and I could really use a hand from someone who's a bit more immersed in this stuff than I am...

The graphics card will be the Palit Nvidia GTX 260, which is PCI-E 2.0. The two processor contenders (having studied the charts on Tom's Hardware and CPUbenchmark) are:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
AMD Phenom II X3 720

Then AMD chip is cheaper, but the AM3 motherboards that will support it seem a fair bit more expensive... and of course you're pretty much obliged to get DDR3.

Could anyone suggest for me which motherboards they'd use with these processors? It looks very much like I'll be going with aria.co.uk as they have come out way cheaper for the components I've chosen thus far.

Thanks again so much for all of your help!

[Deleted User]

Just get an AM2+ board and use DDR2 for the Phenom until the price and speed increase of DDR3 makes it a worthwhile investment.

DevilGoesDown2Bristol

Thanks... but there seem to be a million options no matter what combination I go for!