I am giving up on my current setup. I now have an AOpen AK73-1394 Motherboard with an Athlon XP1800+ CPU and 512 megs of SDRAM (168 pin). I also have an AGP video card that I would like to reuse.

This machine was working fine for a few years but it's now taken to locking up randomly. Sometime when I power it up (or reset (after a crash)) it won't even get to the bios startup screen. I suspect the motherboard as I have ran many tests on this machine to test ram, cpu and harddrives and all have been successful. I have even formatted and reinstalled Windows. (The black screen I got last night was the one that made me smarten up and realize it's probably a deep rooted hardware problem, I haven't checked for leaking/swollen caps yet though.)

I am in a bit of a tigh predicament though, I am about five weeks away from becoming a new dad and I really can't justify spending much money. On the flip side the pc pissed me off last night while trying to combine multiple Winnie The Pooh movies onto one DVD to make watching them easier and to help save the originals!

I don't do any pc gaming, but I do do a fair bit of DVD authoring and some video editing. So far I have found two motherboards that look ok and the price is good. I wouldn't be able to reuse my ram but I might be able to sell it (and my old cpu) to offset the cost of new ram.

Here's what I have found...
Option Number 1, with no cooling fan included.
Option Number 2, with cooling fan and some differences that I am not sure if they make any difference to me.

Any thoughts or suggestions on these setups? Will I notice much of a speed increase from my Athlon 1800+ to a celeron D 2.93ghz?

Thanks for any advice you can offer!

Rene