Comparison help please

[Zhire]

Can someone please help me with a small situation. I have recently with help from THGC bought and tuned my primary computer in my household and I am truely thankful for all of your helpful comments.

Now though I must work on fixing two other problems, I have two old computers that need to be updated do to failings in board / ram type and general old age. The first computer is a rambus board generation 1 pentium 4 1.4 ghz asus p4t. The computer/memory / etc are all slowly degrading with time. It has been almost 5 years now since I bought it. I am wondering mainly if I should stick with working with the p5ad2 or if the p5p800 is fine to do the job. The p4t board is for my raid 1 file share between the 4 computers in my household. The raid mainly contains data and graphic files and occasional lan data so I really am thinking I will need to get upgrade the drives as I only have 120 gb paired. The second computer is a Dell brand name computer my wife bought before I married here it is completely useless other then the geforce card we upgraded it with.

Now the background data in friendly format:
Fileserver computer:
mobo p4t (gen1) (think its slot 450 ?)
Rambus ram 512
2 120 raid 1 w/ controller

UPGRADE: (tell me if this sounds worthless)
mobo asus p5p800
p4 3.0 ghz
sdram 3200 - 2 gig

Graphics computer:
asus p5ad2
3.4 ghz p4
2 gig ram(?)

 

[miahallen]

"I am wondering mainly if I should stick with working with the p5ad2 or if the p5p800 is fine to do the job."

Maybe I feel lost because I havn't read your former posts. But I missing something here: do you already have the p5ad2 and the p5p800, and are those mobo model #'s?

What I will say off the bat is, 2GB ram??? If you'll notice most people around here still only have 1GB, reason being...2GB is still overkill for most users. If you're the type that wants to build these systems so you can go for another 5 years without upgrades, that would make sense, otherwise stick to 1GB on each for now, RAM will likly be much cheaper in a year or two.

 

[miahallen]

Hey one other idea for you, in case you were unaware:

Your p4t has a socket 423 and will accept up to a 2GHz processor. <A HREF="http://www.starmicro.net/detail.aspx?ID=130" target="_new">Starmicro has them for $149</A>. You just have to make sure that your <A HREF="http://www.asus.com/support/cpusupport/cbios_dl/cbios_dl.aspx?MB=P4T&CPU=P4-2.0 GHz(Socket423)&BIOS=1005.002" target="_new">BIOS is up to date</A>.

 

[snotling]

and that will make sense the day a SOHO file server will actually need a fast CPU.

anything above 350mhz will run win2k well enough to share your Mp3s!