[Sonsey]

Hi folks, I'm getting close to the point of wanting to upgrade my old Athlon XP2500+ Barton based system as it really is starting to struggle with day to day use.

After reading round a bit on the net it's obvious that the Intel Core 2 Duo is the processor to go for, my problem is I havn't a clue what Motherboard to pair it up with.

I'm currently completely out of touch with Intel based boards so I could do with recommendations on which chipset to go for, I'm obviously not looking to pay a fortune for it but would would consider going a few extra quid for some useful features. Is there anything out there that stands a bit above the rest, or anything due to be released that is worth waiting a bit for?

It'll be used for the usual photo applications (Lightroom, Photoshop etc.) but I'm also interested in hooking it up to the Plasma for Hi-Def video viewing so onboard HDMI (probably better on the Gfx card though) and a digital sound output (optical/coaxial) could possibly be helpful to have.

That's about it I think, let me know if there's any other info I need to share... so what's out there?