New motherboard and CPU

The chipset on my old motherborad (Asus A8N-E) took a shit and died, so I'm replacing most of the parts on my old rig, which were all in a rather sad state.

So far I've bought a new PSU (Nexus NX-5000 POWER 500W), and a new graphics card (XFX GeForce 9600GT 512MB), and I'd like some suggestions for a new mothercard and CPU.

What I'm looking for is something kinda mid-range, for casual gaming and stuff. For a CPU i was looking at the Athlon 64 X2 6000+, but I heard Intel has the edge right now, is this true?

I have two pieces of ram from my old motherboard, the stickery-thingy says "512MB DDR-400Mhz - CL3", would a gig more be a good choice and can I keep using my old ones?

Final question: Should i buy the CPU boxed and get a separate cooler or get the ones with the cooler included?

Well, basically you will need a motherboard which supports your typo graphic card which is a PCI-e 2.0 based. And secondly, indeed a quad core cpu with an intel based board are in form atm. So if you have the budget I would recommend you to go with such config or else the choice would be yours. :rolleyes:

Intel CPU's overclock better and run faster then comparable AMD CPU's..) The best budget chipset that includes the all important 2.0 PCI-e slot for intel is the P43/P45 (P45 offers limited Xfire at 8x) chipset. The Nvidia chipsets are more expensive but offer SLI (not as valuable as it once was now that the 4800 series ATI cards are dominating).

SLI is the thing where you combine two video-cards right? I doubt I'll be doing that, so the P43 looks good to me.

My budget for the CPU is like 70-100€ btw, forgot to mention that, so the quad core ones look a bit too expensive.

Oh and thanks for replying

See this threads for more help : http://forums.techarena.in/guides-tutorials/1019818.htm
http://forums.techarena.in/tips-tweaks/1035041.htm