I need to start looking for a new motherboard/processor etc

whyamihere
whyamihere Posts: 7,719
edited August 2010 in The Crudcatcher
The motherboard, processor and RAM in my desktop PC are dying. I got them in my first year of college, which would put them at at least 5 years old, and they weren't exactly top of the range then. It's occasionally refusing to boot up, the on board USB ports are slowly failing, and it's in need of renewal.

Unfortunately, building that was the last time I particularly looked at components. At that time, single core AMD Athlon 64s were the processor to have, so that's what I bought. Now, I have no idea. Intel or AMD, and what from them? DDR2 appears to be cheapest at the moment, but how long's this going to hold up before DDR3 becomes better VFM?

What I want:
Multiple cores, naturally.
At least 4gb of RAM. I use virtual machines a lot on this computer. At the moment, it really struggles with it, having only a single core and 1.5gb of RAM. I want this improved quite drastically.
If motherboards exist now with inbuilt decent wireless cards, that would be nice, as the PCI wireless card I have is a pile of arse.

Also, graphics cards. I don't play games, so it doesn't need to be anything particularly special, but I want something quiet yet decent. It needs to have good drivers for Linux, which probably still means Nvidia (ATI's Linux drivers were always notoriously bad).

I don't need hard drives, optical drives, case, power supply, etc. Just a motherboard, processor, RAM and graphics card. Budget - There isn't one. By this I mean I want the cheapest system I can get which will do what I want and last for a good amount of time.

Let's hear some ideas.

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