Hi,

I'm looking to replace the mother board & CPU in by PC. Thing is, I have no clue what to go for as I ve never done this before. Been looking at these, can anyone recomed something?


I dont want or need top spec. I was thinking abaout athlon 1.5GHz ish (Currently have celeron 566)

motherboards...
http://www.redstar.co.uk/product.asp?Cat=2

and CPUs
http://www.redstar.co.uk/product.asp?Cat=3

[Edited by nuclear_pond - 2/18/2003 7:08:00 PM]

Im in themarket to building a new PC as well. On speaking to many people i would recommend going for a recognised brand of motherboard. For example ASUS, ABIT, EPOX

Have a look at www.overclocekrs.co.uk
www.scan.co.uk

Both sell at very reasonable prices. Keep an eye out on scan, they do daily offers and can produce a very good deal on motherboard & CPU

Dont forget that a change of motherboard will also mean you need new RAM as well.

[Edited by BL - 2/18/2003 8:30:14 PM]

you may also need to change the power supply and maybe even the case. If you go for a pentium 4 then you need the extra connectors for it, or for AMD best to get a power supply or a case with power supply that is recommended for AMD and rated at 300 watts or more.

Also, many of the celeron based pcs used a case where the power supply was sited directly over the motherboard, as oppose to higher up in the case. If your case is like this then you may find that there is not enough clearance to fit in the new board with the heatsink and fan because it will need to go underneath the power supply. Even if it will fit I would not recommend doing this because the power supply will block the airflow around the cpu and may lead to overheating.

If you have sdram in your current pc then you can use it with an amd or p4 provided you get a motherboard designed for sdram and set the memory speed accordingly in the bios. To get the best performance from the new cpu though, you are better going for a DDR motherboard and DDR memory, which is really cheap right now. Rambus is better for the P4 but the motherboards and the memory itself are much more expensive than DDR based.

A couple of other things to check out - if you have an AGP2x graphics card then it won't work with a P4, and if you have any ISA cards then these will need replacing because it is unlikely you will get ISA slots on a current board, unless you get a motherboard with onboard stuff so you don't need them anymore.

Ken