Can anyone tell me about motheboard chipsets. i want to know the function of a chipset. good ones? bad ones? i heard to stay away from VIA and that Nforce 3 and 4 are good. but what do they do?

Lol. It Really depends on what you are planing on doing. My opinion is that they are all great quality, Just sucks for different uses! Let me know what you are trying to do so I can give ya an idea! Cheers! _-=EMUSE=-_

well general use, intenet, light gaming. overclocking is a great possibility. Yep!

well sounds like you are defiantly in the mood for nforce bro. Its great for that stuff! _-=EMUSE=-_

Most of the S754 chipsets have similar performance at stock speeds...actually, I think the VIA has a slight lead. But when it comes to overclocking, the nF3 is king! Hellz Yea!

<<well general use, intenet, light gaming. overclocking is a great possibility.>> What you are planning does not require overclocking. It doesn't even require much of a system, certainly not state of the art. You can avoid many of these Windows problems with Linux. Linspire eases the transition for new users

The chipset is sort of an aide for the CPU. If a CPU was a calculator in a book bag, the chipset would probably be considered a binder/pencil box. It is commonly divided into two devices, the northbridge, and the southbridge. The northbridge is usually the more powerful of the two, and is the closer chip to the physical CPU. The northbridge, essentially has a few primary functions. grabbing/addressing memory from the RAM, and deploying the contents over the data bus for the CPU to read. The northbridge also controls how much ram can be installed into the system. The other functions is allowing the southbridge and its parts, and the AGP slot to comunicate with the CPU. In essence the northbridge acts like sort of a receptionist for the cpu, channeling comunication from other parts to communicate directly to the CPU. Today, now that the AGP slot is being phased out, and memory controllers are being implmented directly into CPU cores, the northbridge is becoming marginalized if not completely left out of current designs. One example would be the AMD64 in which the memory functions of the northbridge is now in the CPU core, and there is only a southbridge in the chipset. The southbridge is another chip in the total chipset. Usually the same size as the northbridge, but further away from the CPU (usually near the BIOS), it controls the communication between various peripheral components. A list of what a common southbridge would control would be, IDE controlers, USB ports, PCI slots, and so on. The southbridge also has many other features, but it depends on the features the board has, since most are embedded into the southbridge. StopBadware