whuggins1 - (yes i reused the stock fan... running cool.) i purchased a HP Pavilion a1310n Desktop PC with the A8AE-LE (AmberineM) Motherboard in 2006. it had a Athlon 64 (Single core) 3700+ 2.2 GHz and 2 GB RAM...
Anyway, i came across this thread on october 3 2012 and read that "Savkid" and "Pokyone" installed the opteron 180... (thanks for the info you guys !) and i found one on EbAY For 30.00 delivered ! great little dual core processor.. i had a Nvidia GT7300 pci-e Graphics card just sitting around and it works great compared to the weak onboard ATI..
just in case you want to use the ATI Radeon Xpress 200 onboard graphics with Vista or Windows 7, i used the AMD Catalyst™ Display Driver "10-2_legacy_vista32-64_dd_ccc" found at the "AMD" website... here is the link -
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Legacy/Pages/radeonaiw_vista32.aspx?type=2.4.1&product=2.4.1.3.13&lang=English
when installing windows 7 from a DVD to the SATA Hard Drive, The board would not recognize the Win 7 DVD when loaded in the original IDE DVD Player (although it would still load Win XP.), so i swapped in a SATA DVD Player and it loaded Win 7 just fine.
I ran win 7 x64 at first, no trouble except for the sound drivers would not work, i tried putting in one of a half dozen "C-Media" sound cards that i acquired over the years, and i even found simpified Custom Drivers for the very common and cheap C-Media 8738/8768 chip based soundcards (the numbers are on the chip itself), but still no sound.
so after two days of farting around with x64, i installed Win 7 x86 and still no sound from the MoBo, maybe it is a malfunction on my board. but the cheap and easy to find "C-Media 8738/8768" sound card worked really good with the "CUSTOM" open source 32 bit drivers, and it sounds really wicked.. (and 32 Bit Windows 7 Ran Better than x64) i used the "CMIDriver-1.2.6-bin-x86-WaveRT.zip" Driver for Vista/win 7 found at-
http://code.google.com/p/cmediadrivers/
i ran the "Windows Update", it has some drivers. but when i checked the Device Manager and it was showing an unknown Device -
with HARDWARE ID - ACPI\AWY0001 (right click the Device, click properties, click details, the HARDWARE ID is in the dropdown menu)it is the "Away Mode" AMD Live Driver V1.0.1.0 for Windows 32/64bit XP & 32/64bit Vista.
i'm not sure if it is essential to have or not, but i found advice on where to locate the proper driver for it.
you can search the ASUS website for the "ASUS P2-M3A3200 Motherboard" support.it is listed under "Utilities".
(or click the link i posted below, or cut and past into the address bar)
be sure that when you are prompted to enter an operating system, that you enter Vista x64,
Since it will NOT appear in the list if you select windows 7 as your operating system...
its a ZIP file. so Extract the file, and before you install, open the Folder(s) then Locate the "AMD_LIVE_1_0_1_21" application, right click on it, then click properties, then click the compatability tab, and set it to run in compatibility mode for Windows XP sp3... after installing, check the Device Manager and make sure the driver installed... it worked fine for me, no more "unknown Devices" were showing up. good luck to you.... the address below should take you to the ASUS P2-M3A3200 Motherboard support page...
http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=8&s=17&m=P2-M3A3200&os=17&hashedid=n%2fa
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