How to tell if a mother board is compatible with a CPU

[MikeyD]

How can you tell if a mother board is compatible with a CPU. I am brand new at building pc's, so this question might be stupid. I have a super small budget (less than $400) and would like to have any ideas for CPU's I was thinking of getting an AMD Sempron 64 2800+ / 256KB Cache / 1600MHz FSB / Socket 754 / Hyper-Transport / 64-Bit (Palermo) / Processor with Fan (http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...?EdpNo=1530733 I dont know it looked good with all the speed for that price. This PC I'm building is going to be mainly an office computer.
Anything Anything at all would be great. thank you

[RazorDX]

Search for the socket type. On Newegg or Chiefvalue.com, or even Tigerdirect you can narrow the socket type down and the compatibility of individual processor series.

Here's Newegg's list narrowed down. Chiefvalue's selection is almost identical, but the price there can often be a few dollars cheaper after shipping and all is factored in.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...TTR19=&ATTR20=

[Cricket]

Originally Posted by MikeyD How can you tell if a mother board is compatible with a CPU.

Go to the motherboard maker's web site and find the motherboard you're interested in. Then look around the page for the CPU compatibility list. It'll tell you exactly which CPU's are supported by the motherboard.

Cricket

[MikeyD]

are all hard drives compatible with other parts?

[flanzig1]

Well, the mother board has to support the particular type of hard drive you are going to use. All boards support IDE drives and pretty much all boards support SATA drives. SCSI drives are pretty much for servers.