What should I buy next after I purchase Asus A8N-SLI motherboard?

Question

Need some best recommendations for the mobo. What should I look out for?

Answer 1

I just recently built a nice gaming rig based on the same board you have and it runs great.

Here's what's in it:

AthlonFX 57 - Socket 939... Fastest single core processor at 2.8GHz. Yeah you can go dual and get an FX-60 but it is slightly slower in some apps and not worth the price difference.

2x 1GB Corsair PC3200 DDR400 RAM running in dual channel mode. Getting two 1GB sticks is better than a single 2GB stick since you can dual channel them for improved performance. Also, no need to go any higher than 2GB unless you're using a 64-bit OS. Standard 32-bit XP doesn't use the full 4GB anyway so 2GB is fine and the performance gain from adding more is negligible.

Western Digital Raptor 2 150GB SATA Hard drive (boot). Use this as your main drive for installing programs on. It's blazing fast and load times are quick. Great for games.

Western Digital 250GB SATA (secondary drive). This is what I have (not considered much now), but any capacity is OK for the second drive. The bigger the better. Great for storage or keeping a backup image of your boot drive.

Sound Blaster Audigy 4 - Great card. Best for EAX games and goes well with a multi-speaker sound system.

GeForce 7800GT 256MB - Now you can get a 7900GT for the same price. If you want to really go full throttle on the graphics then get a 512MB 7950GTX. SLI is nice, but if it doesn't quite double your performance so if you have a choice, then get the highest end single card you can get and it will outperform the lower end SLI paired cards. SLI is good if you have a single card and want to upgrade the performance by adding a 2nd card later but seeing what NVIDIA did with the 7800GT it's probably not worth it if they just come out with the next model with far better performance and a lot cheaper than a 2nd card.

16X DVD burner - Cheap and necessary.

Coolermaster 550W SLI power supply - Runs this system great and has fancy blue glowing LED lights inside for a cool aesthetic effect to a see-through case.

Windows XP Media Center Edition - If you choose any, this would be the one to get. Take advantage of the OEM price when building a PC.

Optionals:

HDTV tuner - DVICO Fusion 5 if you want to watch HDTV on a new widescreen monitor

Widescreen monitor - Perfect for watching HDTV. :) And they're not that expensive now. 19" for $200 or less.

5.1 Surround Speakers. Great for movies, games, music.

Case - Coolermaster Wavemaster TAC-101 Aluminum

That's pretty much it. I can run pretty much anything with this rig and it's not even AM2.

Answer 2

If I understand you, you are building your own box here. I suggest you go to the following link and find what you need. Also, might be cheaper to by a MOBO/CPU combo

And I used to be the proud owner of an ASUS mainboard, a P4C800 Deluxe until some issues came up with it. ASUS = Worst customer service EVER.

Went to Abit. Your choice though. :) Good luck