Plunk.

Take a 10-yr-old vacuum cleaner, empty the dust canister, and stick in
new electronics into that filth. That's what my case in part feels
like now with a new MB/CPU/MEM. I really should tear it down, also,
when removing the stock CPU cooler, eventually for installing the
Hyper's (a cooler) proprietary metal back-base to the CPU socket.

Well, the 8-cores handle more than do the quads. Higher stream
processing through more audio filtering layers;- It's a source laser
cable signal, ASUS' pathed into a mixer unit for two amps. Averaging
50-watts CPU draw, at a lazy gait, although will quickly go white-hot
on the CPU chipset support sensors (150 deg F. and rising) if cut
loose for heavily stacked and individually core-assigned queue sound
normalization file processing.

Underclocking, reducing or disengaging above-rate turbo base CPU
multiplier -- really isn't much effect there. It still wants to cook
on those MB power chips. A more robust set of chips, albeit, even
though they'll just as readily heat up (as did my older and former
quad), only at more modest demands the heat/efficiency is observably
improved on this Gigabyte AMD3+ MB/CPU pairing.

A good budget choice for an initial impression, except for its chipped
video ATI 300. That sucks white on a queue ball until its bleached:
one nasty white-washed, bland and colorless reduction of all
desktop/application aspects.

Unexpected solution: I slotted in an old $15 fanless PCI-E ATI board,
played the reset CMOS pin-jumper a few times, (verifying it didn't die
and lockup at DMI), first locking out any displays, until getting it
up properly assigned and running. Also early DVI/HDMI standards: I've
an adapter between the board and SVGA cable to a 40" flatpanel
television. Marginally better, to be sure a more focused and densely
purer concentration of colors and contrasts from that board (running
150MHz faster than the mb's stock ATI 300, e.g. not surprisingly
300MHz). For a newer MB, video is really dumpster material compared
to a generation earlier, when vid-chipped MBs were actually popular,
and when Gigabyte chipped both mine with superior NVidea chipsets.

This "new" MB feels possibly like the last of the "legacy era";- hey,
laugh it up: it even has XP drivers. Decent roll your own material,
by all accounts, especially mine if it will hold up to an
unquestionably outstanding longevity for either my other Gigabyte
boards (both a near 10 years of continuous, sic 24/7, usage), which
are work horses still running largely as-new.

Beggars can't be choosey. Nope. Not when edging on a
super-computer's potentiality. I should write a math program, an
equation for 8 cores to figure out how, precisely, $200 is
comparatively what once a $2M setup cost. Right after, of course,
cleaning off the filth stuck on the inside walls of the case. I
suppose.