mart360

My pc is getting a bit long in the tooth these days.

AMD xp2000+ 1.67

80gig ata h/d

9520 agp vid card.

creative labs souns card.

abit K777 mb
dvd.cd burner

not sure on the memory but its 184 pin 256m x 2 strips

what options do i have if i want to upgrade,

i want to keep the drives and the 2 cards & mem if poss

dont want to go down the intel route either, or pay stupid money for cuting edge stuff

as long as the mobo is tweakable and easy to access, no onboard sound or graphics


Mart

Nick

If you want to keep the memory, there's little point in upgrading.

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

AMD 64-bit socket-754. Look for nForce3 chipset boards, with Abit, Asus, Epox and MSI probably the best for overall performance. DFI is more tweakable, but not for the faint-hearted. Get Athlon not Semprom, although I think socket-754 Athlons won't be around much longer. You can keep the RAM (for most purposes what you have is fine) the gfx and the drives, all you'll replace is motherboard, CPU and cooler. But you may well need a new PSU - get at least 500W as they are a reasonable price these days.


M

jaytc2003

iTrader: (1)

I would go with skt 939 as skt 754 is close to eol. The sempron 3000 has shown to be a very good overclocker, in most benchmarks when overclocked it is very close to its bigger brother. To be honest though, if you want to keep your graphics card and memory its not worth upgrading as they will be holding the pc back so you wouldnt have best use of the new stuff

jowl

Athlon 64 Venice core - Socket939. an 3000 chip would be fine.

Drives will be fine - I'd think about upgrading the memory tho- maybe 2 x 512mb sticks.

You can get motherboards with AGP (quite easily) but it won't be as 'future-proof' - new gfx models are PCI-Express based

EddScott

I had a similar spec to yours and upgraded earlier this year.

I went for:-

DFI Lanparty (non SLI)
AMD3200 Winchester
Asus 6600GT
1gb Geil RAM
SATA HDs
And a posh new case to stuff it all into

I've seen a few people advise against the winchesters but I'm not too sure why. Haven't OC'd the rig yet so don't know if they OC well. The only other thing I can think of is that they don't work as well with 4 512MB RAM sticks as 2 1GB RAM (You have to slow the timing down in order for it to cope - least thats my understanding)

If anyone could shed some light on that last point I'd be grateful.

If I was buying again now I'd go for faster AMD CPU venice etc, 6800GT or one of the cheaper 7800GTs knocking around at the moment and 2 GB of ram instead of 1.

Hope that helps.

DrEvil

For a cheap ish set-up for gaming and other stuff... this could be a nice set-up...

skt 939 AMD64 3000 (circa 100 quid)
Asus A8N-E PCI-E motherboard (circa 70 quid)
1Gb(2x512Mb) Geil Value dual channel kit (circa 60 quid)
ATi X800GT or Nvidia 6600GT (circa 100 quid)
Audigy 2 ZS OEM (circa 50 quid now!)
NEC DVDRW (circa 35 quid)
Floppy drive (circa 5 quid) - bios updates etc...
Hard disks - SATA or SATAII from Seagate, Hitachi or Samsung are nice n cheap and personally tried all.
PSU 350W to 400W ish, make sure its ATX 2.x compatible + PCI-E!
CASE, get one with 120mm fans for quietness

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

The man said he wanted to keep his graphics card, so why is everyone ignoring that? Yes, it's rubbish, but he did ask...


There are a small number of NF3 socket-939 motherboards about, but everyone here is flogging PCI-E. If you got the money and are willing to spend it, then yes, go that route. But it's not a complete necessity yet.


M

DrEvil

Sorry - skim read and hit send..

_Meridian_ has the right idea in that case.

mart360

to you pc heads the graphics card may be rubbish, but it does the job it needs to do for me, and i only bought it a few weeks ago!!

does it matter if it dosent display 6 trillion parsecs of z buffer alpha shading phong gourad pixels??

i play the occasional game, as long as it plays its fine... i have a ps2 for the other stuff.

re overclocking, i bought an abit m/b as it was tipped as the easiest to o/c..

yea right, as soon as i try any deviation from auto, it wont boot, thats highly overclockable!!

at least my last pentium could be made to up ponys with one jumper!

still i will have a llok see whats on offer

cheers

Mart

_Meridian_

iTrader: (1)

Later Athlons are multiplier-locked: alter the multiplier in BIOS and the board won't POST. But fsb changes should still be possible.

Most expensive but most future-proof: socket-939, NF4, PCI-E

Less expensive, less futureproof: socket-939, NF3, AGP

Least expensive, quickest to date: socket-754, NF3, AGP.


M