StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I have a pretty old computer.
It's only a 1200mhz Athlon Thunderbird with the following specs:
-512MB SDRam
-40gb failing HD
-Radeon 9600PRO

The monitor, mouse and keyboard are not worth mentioning, the speakers are as old as 1996.

I don't think I need that much more power, I don't play games and I am not sure now is the best time to upgrade either, what with the apple mac starting to use Intel chips, might be possible to run windows on such a machine which means no emigration headaches, really just a pretty PC that runs OS-X.

I am thinking though about some cheap and effective way to tidy me over for a year or two, maybe a new motherboard or just CPU(dunno how fast a CPU this board can take) or more RAM.

The HDD has to go anyway ofcourse so thats not relevant.

Since PCI-X is in and here to stay for Video cards you are in kind of a bind, either you can simply upgrade to the fastest CPU aviable for your MB or go with one of the new Venice core Athlons and a new motherboard to support it

But then you hit the problem of all Video cards going PCI-X, there ARE a few MB out there that have AGP slots and PCI-X slots on them, pick one of those, a Venice, and then a new hard drive and your good to go.

Erm, isn't PCI-X a different specification than PCI Express?

Pu-239 wrote:Erm, isn't PCI-X a different specification than PCI Express?

Yes, it is and he's not the only one to mix the two terms up at times.
IMHO, the best 'bang for the buck' intermediate upgrade path if you don't need the latest and greatest video card is a Socket 754 or 939 Athlon64 setup w/AGP instead of PCI-e.
As for which chipset, my personal experience is that while the nForce3 is easy to overclock and is stable at high overclocks, nVidia still hasn't resolved some USB device incompatibilites and the intermittent failure to detect SATA hard drives that occurs intermittently for a lot of people (including myself).

In January I recommended the DFI nF3 board, but the USB and SATA issues that cropped up led me to ditch it later on for an Asus K8V-SE Deluxe VIA K8T800 board.

The Asus isn't overclockable at all, but it has had zero USB issues, has never failed to detect any of my SATA drives, and is stable as a rock.

Well, 939 is upgradable to dual core if you care and plan to upgrade when prices go down.

Search & replaced PCIe for factual correctness:

Mr Bean wrote:Since PCIe is in and here to stay for Video cards you are in kind of a bind, either you can simply upgrade to the fastest CPU aviable for your MB or go with one of the new Venice core Athlons and a new motherboard to support it

But then you hit the problem of all Video cards going PCIe, there ARE a few MB out there that have AGP slots and PCIe slots on them, pick one of those, a Venice, and then a new hard drive and your good to go.

PCI-X is an enhancement to PCI and is an utter deadend and is only widely seen in server components.

PCIe is the proposed replacement for PCI, and is being adopted really fast

I would suggest looking at Ars Technica budget box for ideas. You can probably reuse your current OS and any CD/DVD drives, monitor, mouse & speakers.

Argh PCIe not PCI-X my mistake

Yeah, I got a AGP/939 board, mere moments before my AGP card exploded, forcing me to buy a new one ANYWAY. Cheap, though.

Well, one of those motherboards and CPUs on ars + 1gb of PC-3200 DDR ram would set me back 380 euros, which is like 460 dollars.

For a cheap upgrade path for a socket 754, and if you have abit more dough, go for one of the 754 PCI-E boards(they exist).