DBoy wants a new PC!

[McNeo]

Might be a good buy now, but you wont be upgrading that thing at all, with anything, ever.

AMD can't catch intel on the processors.
Dual Core is good, but its a standard now. It should be good if you don't do games with a lot of AI too much.
However, the processor is good for the price, I reckon.

The Board has two PCI slots and one AGPx8 slot.
All modern graphics cards work with a PCI-E x16. However, as you said you're just gonna plonk in your old FX5500 in there, I wouldn't see why that would have a PCI-E interface so that shouldn't be a problem. However, the most advanced AGPx8 card you'll find is either a ATi 1xxx series or an Nvidia 7xxx series. I dont think the 8600 GT has been released with an AGP interface, but dont quote me on that.

The motherboard is cheap, so don't expect much if you try your hand at overclocking. More importantly, look at the heatsink (or lack of) on the southbridge. Thats gonna become hot, definately, and the ponsy northbridge heatsink wont do wonders either. I see no cooling at all on the subsidiary chips on the CPU either, so it would be a good idea not to try overclocking at all with this.

The board is also not advanced enough to take high density memory, but seeing as you wont be running a fileserver or anything too memory demanding, this shouldnt be a problem. 2GB is enough anyway.

The memory also lacks a heatspreader (however useless some might say they are) so dont touch their frequencies.

I even doubt that you can overclock much with this board at all. It looking pretty bare, I can only imagine what the bios must look like.

You also want to buy an exhaust fan to fit the back of that case, otherwise it'll overheat. That tiny PSU fan wont keep your computer cool for long.

As you say you'll be in need of a CPU cooler, I'll suggest, as always, the Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 64. Should be easy enough to mount, its cheap and its very good at its job. Certainly does well with my E6600, which is a more powerful chip.

@bout multi cores in a nutshell:

Dual core means literally two seperate processors put together. They are two seperate structures and do their own seperate things. Dual core means the ability to execute two threads simultaneously. Think of it as two single core processors running on a single motherboard.

This makes your computer fast with programs that are designed to send threads to both CPUs efficiently. However, things like Freelancer dont do this, as they are older programs and feed information in single threads instead of simultaneously.

However, dual core is handy in that, for the more demanding programs such as games, video rendering and even picture rendering (photoshop, anyone?), the processes become a lot faster as most of these programs are designed to use both cores efficiently.

Quad core is the same, only imagine four seperate single core processors on a motherboard.

Of course, this will change when cell processors make their debut, but thats quite far away in computer terms. The PS3 makes use of a 7-core cell processor though, but its architecture is completely different and so is its functioning, so it shouldnt be compared to the dual and quad cores we have now in PCs.

@Tic: Yes, C2D's cost a lot more than their AMD equivalents, because they are a lot faster than said equivalents. However, AMD did have the upper hand until about a year and a half ago, completely outpacing their Pentium IV rivals. It is too unfair to call that AMD chip "weak".