Need advice on upgrading an old Pent. II 350

[Guest]

Hi, wanted to ask you tech. guys a few questions on upgrading my system. Let me give a bit of info here first.

I have a compaq 5170 with a pentium II 350, 256 megs of ram, a 10 gig HD, and I disabled the integrated 4 meg AGP and put in a stealth 540 32 meg PCI card. I know this system is way outdated, but even as a gamer, it's lasted me the last few years and is only now starting to limit me on what I can run. So far just been playing Asheron's call, Baldur's gate, Diablo II and similar titles, but I just got the space sim Terminus and it seems that the pentium II processor is slowing me up too much to play this game adequatley- I am right at the recommended minimum system requirements.

Anyways, what I was looking at doing was putting in a overdrive from evergreen technologies (permorma 800) which will bring my system up to 800MHz celeron. I check and do have the 440BX/ZX chipset with 100MHz bus speed. Socket type is slot 1. It says CPU name is celeron under the scanned info the evergreen program got from my system though compaq says it's a pentium II and it does have 256K cache. The overdrive costs $139, which seems ok. Anyways, my main question is if this sounds like a good alternative or if I have a cheaper solution. Either if anyone sells these cheaper than evergreen or if I can just stick a faster CPU on my motherboard. I don't mind settling for 600 MHz speed if it's much cheaper. Don't really want to put too much into this old system anyways- the fact that the AGP is integrated into the motherboard makes this a soon to be trashed system (maybe in 6 months).

What I eventually want to do is get a Thunderbird with a 1.3+ gig processor/266 FSB and DDR memory along with a 7200 RPM HD and a GEForce3 vid card. I'd like to wait another 6 months so that prices drop further- especially the vid card. Right now the lowest price I can find on a loaded system is about $1,400- thats with 256meg DDR memory. I figure in 6 months that same system will be closer to $500 or less based on how things have been going. If anyone knows if I can buy something like this now for under $800, I may forgo upgrading my Pent II. Right now, all the games I really like don't require much more than a slightly faster CPU over what I have.

Thanks in advance for any info. or advice you can give me.

 

[Guest]

for now I recomend you but in an 800 PIII, you can get the 100mhz type, but for the money you are spending you could replace your MB and cpu and either get a 1ghz pIII or an athlon.

Good luck

M

if at first you don't succeed , destroy all evidence that you ever tried...

 

[kaz]

Go with a Slot 1 P3 850 or 1Ghz processor.

 

[FatBurger]

What I did (with a P2 333 as a server), was just buy a motherboard + Duron 800 for $100 at Fry's. You can probably do something similar. I wouldn't go to Celeron, a Duron is better (even though a P3 is way better). Regardless, Duron is king of budget processors.

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Whoever thinks up a good sig for me gets a prize

 

[Crashman]

The problem with Compaqs is that sometimes it is hard to tell what processors are supported on their motherboards. While the overdrive should work, a PIII 750 would be a better solution, provided your motherboard can support Coppermine processors without a specialized converter. The overdrive has that specialized converter, which makes a system otherwise incompatable with the Coppermine work with one.
I would normally say to get a motherboard and processor, unless you know for sure that your system can support the Coppermine, or you don't mind paying $140 for a $70 Celeron in a special adapter.

Cast not thine pearls before the swine