Well, first you need to figure out "all that you need". I went with the
A8N-SLI because first I wanted to upgrade my graphics (from agp) to the
7800gtx (which is pcie) with room for a future upgrade to SLI (an
additional 7800gtx) and that's also why the 600W Seasonic. My existing
disks are IDE which I'm ok with bandwidth wise because my PC use is not
quite high end gaming (1/2 life, quake 4, ... ) browsing,
ripping/playing DVDs ... the A8N supports 4 IDE. I had 4 DDR400 RAMs
(512MB) ... the A8N-SLI supports 4 and runs 4 way interleave so that
worked out well. And the AMD 4000+ I decided on is very adequate
performance for me ... i.e., don't need a dual core because I'm mostly
only doing one thing at a time. And I still don't have a case ... all
the parts are stacked up here on my desk. I will say one thing ... I am
very impressed with the obvious quality of the A8N-SLI and the AMD
4000+ (inc heatsink and fan). I've been an Intel buyer the past 2 PCs
because the old AMD stuff was obviously clocked to the max, hot, noisy.
My current system is clocked at 220 with the HyperTransport at stock x5
(which gives 1.1G) and the DDR400 RAM is at a safe 3,3,3,8 ... and the
current temp is 28C while browsing and will go up to 41-43C at 100% cpu
usage. So ... I thought about my requirements, did a lot of browsing
and relearning about AMD ... and I'm quite satisfied with my current
system.