Help upgrading ASUS A8N-E

[zibbsy]

Hey everyone, I'm new hereand also relativley new to computing hardware.

I have recently received an old pc from a friend that was heading for the skip.

It's an old custom ps with:

ASUS-A8N-E motherboard
2x 512mb ram
320gb hdd
256mb Radeon X800 PCI-E graphics card
I'm not too sure on the processor
All I know is that it's an amd 2.2ghz processor

The reason it was to be thrown away was because it wouldn't boot,
the fans would spin and everything would seem to work.

After some playing about I discovered the heat sink on what I believe to be the north bridge chipset was extremely hot, the small fan had butn out so it didn't work.

I placed a large normal fan over the mobo and the computer runs perfectly fine. When I turn the pc off the chipset heatsink is very cool. I have ordered a new heatsink for the chipset and in question. Hopefully this'll do the trick!

Anyway, I'd like to know what I can do to upgrade this mobo?
What graphic cards can be used?
Maximum RAM?
New processor?

I've tried researching but can't find the information I need.

Thanks to everyone in advance!

 

[BrokenAtari]

The CPU "AMD Dual-Core Opteron 185" is the fastest (non-overclocked) processor for the board with the latest bios update.
Maximum memory is 4GB at DDR-400
1 x PCIe x16 slot non-2.0. So, any modern video card (pci-express) is reverse compatable with that port. However there will be a bottleneck.

 

[JCB1]

take a look here for the specs on your motherboard ASUSTeK Computer Inc. - Motherboards- ASUS A8N-E

You can also think about raiding your disks to get a bit of a speed boost