I am rebuilding a system and I need some help. The system specs are as follows:

AMD Athlon 1600+
Asus A7V266-E (DEAD!)
2x 256MB PC2100 generic RAM
ATI Radeon 7500 64MB Video Card
2x Samsung 80gig hard drives
LiteOn CDRW/DVD Combo

The motherboard is very much dead and I want to replace the Asus A7V266-E with a SOLTEK 75FRN2-L nForce2 board… keeping the 266Mhz FSB processor and the 266mhz DDR RAM if possible. Does anyone see a problem with this? Will I be able to use two sticks of RAM without using the dual channel option? Or should I purchase a single 512MB stick? Any processor issues I should know about? What about the 4x card in the 8x slot… any issues there I should be aware of?

I realize that this board will not be a huge performance gain (if any at all) with this current configuration… but having the system running is my first priority… after which I will deal with performance upgrades like new CPU/RAM/Video etc.

All of your questions have a good answer.

And your memory may be able to run in dual channel mode. But if not, you can always use both sticks in single channel. The performance impact of upgrading the mobo will be negligible, so you might consider getting a cheaper board. The newegg refurb page often has $29 boards w/free delivery that will do the job for you.

johnoh,

Thanks for the quick reply and some good news! I will give the old generic RAM a go dual channel and if it doesn't work... it is no big deal. And I think I will stick with this board... I will be upgrading in the near future so it will be a good board to work off of. Thanks again...