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guyladouche · #2 (**permalink**) 02-26-2007, 12:48 AM

Hi. I have two suggestions. First, save yourself some money and dump the third piece of RAM. 2GB is pretty much all you'll ever need from now until...well...quite some time. Might as well save yourself some money. And if it turns out that you do need it down the road, then you can just buy more. But to point out--Putting a third piece of RAM in a motherboard with 4 memory slots and two memory controllers disables the dual-channel memory mode. You'd need 2 or 4 pieces of matched RAM to properly operate it in dual-channel mode--which is very much worth it.

Speaking of gaming--I would steer clear of that video card, and any Nvidia video card that uses Turbocache technology (and any ATI card that uses Hypermemory). This is a very, very poor way of rendering graphics. If you want to do any gaming at any sort of good detail or resolution at 1024x768 or higher, you'll need a real video card. Relying on system memory for rendering graphics is not a good way to go. It leads to lots of lag in games, and very low framerates. Howver, that card has a good amount of on-board RAM (though it's slower DDR2 as compared to GDDR4 that is curently out right now), so if you do choose to stick with that card, I'd recommend disabling the Turbocache.

It seems as if everything is compatible. I'm not sure how to answer whether it'll suit your needs because you didn't mention what those needs are. If it's gaming, then probably not--due to the video card. If it's general use, then definitely. That system won't be nearly as fast as a Core 2 Duo system, but it's a decent system nonetheless.