[mdlug] Well, shucks - motherboard/CPU advice needed

[Ingles, Raymond]

My main linux box is officially toast. Probably literally, something critical
overheated in there, it seems. It won't boot anymore, with two cpus or either
CPU alone. At this point it wouldn't be cost-effective to replace either the
motherboard or the CPUs by themselves... and if I'm replacing both I might as
well go whole hog and replace the guts with something new.

 Here's the problem. I have to do this as cheaply as feasible, and for that I
want to re-use my existing hardware insofar as possible. Unfortunately, this
puts certain constraints on what I can pick, since it's slightly older tech.

 The main issue is that it's PATA - in other words, ribbon cable IDE for the
drives. I have two 120GB hard drives, a DVD-ROM drive, and a DVD-RW drive. I
could lose the extra DVD drive, but I've gotta have the disks and the burner.
It's got an AGP video card, but any onboard Nvidia chipset these days would be
better than the card I have, so I'm not *too* worried about that.

 I need firewire to pull data off our camcorder, either built onto the
motherboard or else a PCI slot so I can put in my existing firewire card. I
also have a SoundBlaster Live that I want to keep using - it's pretty good at
sound capture and I doubt if onboard sound would do as well.

 To sum up:

 Gotta have:
   - at least one parallel ATA hookup, ideally two
   - firewire or PCI slot
   - AGP slot or onboard NVIDIA graphics

 Strongly desired:
   - SBLive audio, either built-in or another PCI slot
   - PCI Express slot for upgradable video later

 I'd like a dual-core or better CPU, and if I could re-use the RAM I have
that'd be nice. (I think it's PC2100 ECC RAM.) But RAM's pretty cheap now,
I've heard.

 Anyway, any advice? Places to look, exceptional deals right now, etc?

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                              (313) 227-2317

 "There is a fine line between being on to something and on something."
                          -Friar Broccoli
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