basic questions about new machine from an old guy

It's been years since I followed all the PC technology so I am having a lot of trouble figuring out what supports what. Please help an old geezer save a few pennies.

I am buying the core of a new machine. I am upgrading from my 1gig P3. I am upgrading almost entirely for civ4. Right now I don't play any other games. Consequently, I want to keep my geforce4 4200 and try to save some cash. Obviously the conversion to PCI-X is complicating things. There's plenty of room to upgrade to another AGP video card in the future if I find a game I want to play.

The sweet price/performance CPU appears to be an Athlon 64 3200. This is the socket 939, 1000 FSB version I believe.

So I need a motherboard that supports the 1000 fsb socket 939 athlon 64, but still has an AGP slot.

Is an nforce3 250 with 1000 fsb (socket 939) going to work for me?

I can't find an nforce4 board with an AGP slot. Anyone know about this?

Further, does this require DDR400 RAM, or will DDR333 RAM work? The motherboards in this area support DDR400, but I have some old DDR333 stuff sitting around I'd like to use if I can.

Any other general advice for me?

Sounds like you have done your homework at least. Yeah, I believe that you must use an nForce3 board for AGP. Also you can run your DDR333 instead of DDR400. Good luck. This will be a nice upgrade for you as well.

I keep seeing positive things about the Asrock 939. Especially as a transitional board. AGP slot for now, and pcie for later.

The other option is to look at the nVidia GeForce 6150 chipset.

If you think the onboard graphic will cope with the games you play then it will give you the PCI-E expasion route later on.

Luck..............

Thanks guys.

Call me closeminded but I am terrified of a ULI chipset. I suffered terribly from the early via chipsets (starting from the slot A athlon classic), and just don't have the testicular fortitude to experiment at all. I have my heart set on an nvidia chipset this time around.

Forgive me as I ponder outloud. Please correct me if I am full of shit. As I read more, I see what is really confusing me is that these athlon 64s have the memory controller on the CPU, not the chipset. Further, these socket 939 athlon 64s are all dual channel, so I need paired sticks of DDR333 RAM. Learn something new everday. I guess it makes sense...90% of the RAM advertised at newegg is in pairs.

You only need paired ram if you want to use the dual channel memory feature. Yes it would be faster but just use the memory you have, it will work just fine.

Oh, it's not required? Very interesting.

Exactly how closely matched do two sticks of RAM have to be in order to turn on dual channel? Same size, or down to the CAS speed (or whatever they have nowadays)?

For paired memory, or matching sticks, all they really need to be is same size, speed, and timings. However, there are some capatability issues with different brand sticks. However, if you bought your ram at the time, chances are they from the same lot and are thus close enough to be considered "matched."