best athlon processor and motherboard combo?

[dafydd_brown]

I was gonna go for an Athlon Xp3000 and gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 motherboard... and this may well sound silly but after reading some posts on this very message board and doing a little research it seems to be unanimous that spending more money on an Athlon64 would be better!!

I could probably stretch to an Athlon 64bit 3200+ with either a Asus A8V Deluxe Socket-939 VIA/KT800Pro or
MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum SKT 939 Nforce3 motherboard...
is it worth it? I can probably afford it but would like to save money if i can obviously....

I'd like to avoid upgrading again for a while and would also like to be able to run Half life 2 as well as possible/at all!
Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[_SiLv3R_]

ithink its worth it if u cough up the extra cash for the 64 bit processor... the 3200+ is a good choice and for the mobo go with either the msi k8n neo2 or the gigabyte GA-K8NSNXP... because inmy opinion and ive read a lot of online hardware reviews that agree... the mobos with the nforce 3 chipset performmuch better than themobos with the KT800 Pro chipsets

 

[dafydd_brown]

Cheers, i'll most likely go ahead and do that then.
Any advice on fans and heatsinks? My eyes are going funny reading all the various posts on the topic! is more expensive necessarily better? and how difficult (usually) are they to fit?