New system compatibility question / advice / request for assistance :)

Hi All,

My old mobo died on me yesterday night so I figured I need an upgrade since I can't drag my P4 any longer anyway - too old especially that I play games too (not like Crysis but hmm, doesn't hurt to have a decent machine).

My only problem is that every time I do this I need to re-discover and understand all the specifications. I have chosen a few items, and since this covers CPU/MB/RAM/VGA I figured this is the most appropriate forum to open a thread in. So I'm going to mention my initial choices here and please if you see something wrong, mention it here. Mostly I'm afraid of real bad choices or incompatible items (will buy them separately). I'll use the machine for gaming (and other stuff that isn't relevant since they aren't resource-intensive). Don't think I'll play much with OC either, tried a bit here and there but not the kind of guy with huge fans and water cooling etc. to beat records - just want a decent machine.

MB: ASUS P5K PRO, or P5KR (does it take the below CPU natively, out of box, w/o BIOS upgrade?)
- maybe GigaByte P35-DS3
CPU: Core2 Duo-2,66GHz/1333MHz (E8200), does it worth it over a 6750? Real small price difference, no clue about performance.
RAM: 2GB/1066MHz DDR-II Kingston PC2-8500 HyperX (Kit, KHX8500D2K2/2G)
VGA: Gigabyte NX96T512H-B 512MB PCI-E (9600GT gpu). I'd stick to Nvidia, some say there's better Linux drivers for it (will also play a bit around in Linux, planning to try Wine etc).
Another question, will my Enermax EG425AX-VE PSU (420w) be enough for this? Some say yes, but you guys are the experts. Wouldn't buy a new PSU unless I must, this unplanned upgrade is screwing my budget as it is already.

The 4 items above will be (roughly) around $700 US over here. I welcome suggestions of balancing this budget around but wouldn't like to exceed it.

I'm quite sure you're overcrowded with these kind of posts, but I really didn't know who to turn to. I don't trust the guys that would sell me these. Anyhow, I'd appreciate any kind of feedback to above system specs. While I'm kinda a PC/Internet addict that will have a real hard time for a few days, I wouldn't want to rush it more than necessary.

Thank you.

imo quad core is th only sensible choice for system longevity
dual might be faster with today's software but it soon won't be as multithread programming is embraced by all

Quad was sort of out of the question because of the price tag (even q6600 was higher and if I would get a quad I'd want something newer than the first in the series).

I got the above config with the Gigabyte P35-DS3 mobo.
All works fine as far as I can tell, except BIOS and cpu-z showing RAM running at 800MHz / 5-5-5-18 / 1.8v by default (I think it should be 1066MHz / 2.2v / 5-5-5-15).
I am not sure why it didn't automatically set it that way, not sure if I should change those settings manually or there's a good reason why it set the memory to 800MHz (some problem maybe). True this ram is not on the mb's memory compatibility list (not sure what that means, maybe nothing, they probably don't test and include all ram even if compatible).