Old PC needs new lease on life - what to upgrade to?

[acpryor00]

Greetings.

I have a 4-yr old PC that has a messed up XP installation, so now seems like a good time to upgrade the hardware since I have to format the drive, etc. I have several Raptor drives in it along with 2gb of ram (Kingston HyperX 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)). Anyway, it's got an old Pentium 4 Northwood 3.0ghz CPU installed on a Intel D875PBZLK 478 motherboard. What I'd like to do is upgrade the motherboard, CPU, and case only. I'd like to get a Core 2 Duo CPU and a motherboard with firewire ports (not necessary because I could drop an add-in card if necessary), e-Sata would be nice but not essential.

Is there a newer CPU/Motherboard combo that will work with my exiting ram, etc? Most of my other components are in good shape. Or am I looking at upgrading the ram, etc.

Any and all advice is appreciated.

Andrew

 

[chookman]

You wont find a board that supports C2D and DDR ram....

Im afraid your only option would be to go new CPU, mobo, ram and GPU as i dont think ull find a board that supports C2D with AGP port either... sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

 

[emp]

The onyl thing I can think of is an Old motherboard Socket 939 and an Athlon 64 X2 for S939, which works with DDR400 ram, however I would very much rather build a new PC completely with newer components than trying to salvage anything there.

 

[NMDante]

Look at AsRock boards if you want to keep the DDR ram.
The AsRock 4CoreDual board. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157115

It uses DDR and DDR2 ram, although you would better off going DDR2. Plus it's cheap, and can take a Quad core (supposedly). No firewire ports, but everything else.