Will Motherboard limit PC performance?

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Guest

Guest
I currently have a PIII 800EB with 256MB RAM, Windows ME, 20Gb harddrive 5400rpm, 32MB Nvidia TNT2 M64. My Motherboard is a via appollo pro 133 chipset, 133 Mhz bus, socket 370.

My question is whether this motherboard/chipset will limit the performance of my pc? It doesn't even have AGP x4. It has AGP x1/x2. How much of a performance gain will my cpu and graphics card gain if i changed the motherboard that includes AGP 4x. Is it worth while to get a new motherboard to improve performance? Any help/suggestions would be grEAtly appreciated.
 
G

Guest

Guest
I noticed you use Windows ME. You did not say how you use your machine, but Windows 2000 is considerably faster than ME. This assumes that your applications and hardware are compatible with Windows 2000. It's my understanding that performance gains of up to 15-20% are not uncommon.

ABIT KT7A Raid; 1ghz T-bird; 256 MB CAS 2 Ram; VisionTek G-force 2 GTS 32 Mb DDR; SBL Plat 5.1
 

phsstpok

Splendid
Dec 31, 2007
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I have a Duron 600 overclocked to 1008 on a KT7 motherboard. I also have a Geforce256 SDR (150/210 overclock). My 3DMark 2000 score was 5509 at AGP 2X and 5533 at 4X. I didn't write down by quake III arena scores but I seem to recall a difference of 0.3 frames per second. It's hardly worth mentioning.
 
G

Guest

Guest
I mainly use my Pc for web surfing,games,the odd dvd movie. If i get a motherboard with AGPx4 feature and upgrade video card to say geforce ultra with 32mb ram will there be significant performance gains worthy of the price? I have windows 2000 but haven't loaded it on because i thought maybe it wasn't suited for playing games.
 
G

Guest

Guest
For the games you will notice a large difference if you upgrage the mobo and the video card to the new Geforce 2 cards. Especially games like quake, where it uses all the cool features of the card.
 

Arrow

Splendid
Dec 31, 2007
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From what I see, the hard drive you have there is a bottleneck.

Rob
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G

Guest

Guest
Any suggestions for a good harddrive performance/price wise?
 

Arrow

Splendid
Dec 31, 2007
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I would recommend an IBM 75GXP series drive. These are 7200RPM drives, and if I may say, they ones found to be most welcomed by high end IDE users. They offer excellent performance, and their price isn't bad either.

Rob
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