The funny thing about how expensive technology is, is that as soon as you buy something that costs $300, it's automatically obsolete and is worth roughly 1/3 of the original price. Actually, it was pretty much obsolete the moment you bought it. The world of the PC DIYer is a fantastic world, but the price bracket sucks the biggest set of hairy boys possible. That's why when I had to replace my motherboard on my tight budget, I went for one that wouldn't break the bank. Because let's face it. There are going to be a couple dozen introduced next week that will render your new i7 compatible board as ancient technology. I think I'll stick with my Athlon Dual Core until the price range comes down.

The motherboard I chose to replace the junker with the fried PCI-E slot is the GeForce 6100PM-M2. Yeah, it has an Nvidia chipset. And while Nvidia may not make the best chipset on earth, they make one of the cheapest when you are on a budget. And since it supports my Athlon 64 X2, along with 16GB of DDR2 RAM, I am more than happy to give it a shot