Birthday Presents, pleaseFollow

Kao is awesome. Just sayin'.

Yeah, that's why I only use Newegg. They rock.

I tend to prefer Asus boards because they are usually very stable, ahve good warrenties, and usually have decent features. Gigabyte boards are fine too, and you won't notice a performance difference between either board. that being said, i'd go with the asus board personally just because I trust them more on the hardware front.

For that processor, with the core i3's, you lose intel's "Turbo boost" ram acceleration technology. You are talking maybe a 1-2% performance hit. It's actually very close in all other respects, and i'll be honest I didn't even look at the core i3's before now. For the price versus what you actually get, it makes sense. You really want one of the quad core with hyperthreading Core i7's, for 8 total cores, but that exceeds your entire build budget by itself heh.

I'd probably go with that i3 in that price range then, given the specifications, since the DDR3 ram listed is pretty mid range anyways. $73 bucks, use it for a few years, then maybe snag one of thsoe higher end Core i7's when they come down in price significantly and buy yourself another 3 years on that box, likely with a video card upgrade at that time? The cheaper processor and then maybe use the savings to get the other 2GB ram kit would be your best performance scenareo.

Looking at the second board you linked, that is actually a microATX board, designed for small form factor "shuttle" type PC's. That will work just fine in the case listed, but it does have onboard video, and it is going to be somewhat less efficient at heat dissipation due to the smaller, more compact design.

The onboard video is complicated. On previous motherboards, the onboard video was a chip on the motherboard itself. with Core i3 / i5/ i7, the video chip is actually embedded in the processor, and not all of the processors have it. For example, this core i5 processor http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115215 , which I recently put into my downstairs media PC is a a quad core processor, a bit higher end than that I3 or the dual core i5, but it lacks the video chip. I found out the hard way that the onboard video ports on the motherboard I used in the media PC (nearly identical to your gigabyte one, just the Asus brand one) don't work. So I ended up putting in a low end video card in it to tide me over. That particular PC isn't slated to be a gaming rig, so I was prepared to use the onboard video.

In your case, both processsors you are looking at have that embedded video chipset, and you could use it, but I will tell you this, it will suck for gaming and you don't want to. On the plus side, if you do get the gigabyte motherboard the onboard video won't take very many system resources from you, though if you leave it enabled it will take about 256MB of your system ram. you can disable it easily enough, though if you are at 4GB I think you will find that you won't really notice. Still, onboard video is one more system you'll have to patch and troubleshoot, so i'd avoid it if you don't have a real need for it.

I was getting the video card you recommended above. It's within my budget and has the capacity to run "ultra mode" in City of Heroes (albeit not with maxxed out slider options but the cards needed for that are well beyond my budget).

This.

Fixed your spelling error as well.