Ok I've been planning and building a $500ish small form factor desktop for a while now. We are pretty strapped for cash so now I am looking at plan B.
I originally wanted to get a pretty good mobo with a lot of the next-gen technologies so it would very upgradable. (SATA, DDR2(800), and pci express)
So now I am thinking about doing this in two stages. Stage 1 being getting the bare minumum components I need to go P4 (775) and putting them in my case with the exsisting HD, PCI graphics card and power supply.
I plan on getting the same motherboard I was looking at for the complete system (ASUS P5B-VM LGA 775) 512mb of DDR2, and a $100 Pentium D and a new combo drive to replace the two obsolete/unreliable optical drives I have now.
Stage 2 will be in a year or so and that will be the sweet-looking case, 1 GB DDR2, and a new grapics card.
Here is my question: I currently have a 933 PIII Dell dimension tower. I know mATX boards are supposed to match up to ATX mounting points but will there be any issues with putting the mATX in there, connecting it to the power supply and having all the jacks line up to the openings in the back? The HD has been upped to a WD 120G and I have a 64mb nvidia graphics card so those will OK for now.
I know the P4 will have higher power demands but I hoping since I will be able to eliminate my USB PCI card, my sound card, and one of my optical drives my over-all power requirements will be about the same.
I don't that much gaming anymore, I'll play around with some stratigy or racing games but I don't need to play halflife 2 or anything this is really needed just because XP seems to have gotten so bloated with the updates that everything is slow now. the P3s time is finally up...
:flamesuit:
I originally wanted to get a pretty good mobo with a lot of the next-gen technologies so it would very upgradable. (SATA, DDR2(800), and pci express)
So now I am thinking about doing this in two stages. Stage 1 being getting the bare minumum components I need to go P4 (775) and putting them in my case with the exsisting HD, PCI graphics card and power supply.
I plan on getting the same motherboard I was looking at for the complete system (ASUS P5B-VM LGA 775) 512mb of DDR2, and a $100 Pentium D and a new combo drive to replace the two obsolete/unreliable optical drives I have now.
Stage 2 will be in a year or so and that will be the sweet-looking case, 1 GB DDR2, and a new grapics card.
Here is my question: I currently have a 933 PIII Dell dimension tower. I know mATX boards are supposed to match up to ATX mounting points but will there be any issues with putting the mATX in there, connecting it to the power supply and having all the jacks line up to the openings in the back? The HD has been upped to a WD 120G and I have a 64mb nvidia graphics card so those will OK for now.
I know the P4 will have higher power demands but I hoping since I will be able to eliminate my USB PCI card, my sound card, and one of my optical drives my over-all power requirements will be about the same.
I don't that much gaming anymore, I'll play around with some stratigy or racing games but I don't need to play halflife 2 or anything this is really needed just because XP seems to have gotten so bloated with the updates that everything is slow now. the P3s time is finally up...
:flamesuit:
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