New system

[Guest]

I've been somewhat out of the loop of what the latest and greatest is for components lately. If some of you could possibly suggest some things it would be great. I'm wanting to upgrade to a AMD XP 1700. Basically, what motherboard that has the VIA KT266A chipset is going to provide the best performance and stability. I'm a gamer btw. Also i haven't a clue what type of DDR memory is needed now. I currently have a Raedon 8500 and Sound Blaster Live that will be put with this as well. Lastly, I currently don't have Windows XP but have 98se. Do i NEED to upgrade to XP or can i just stick with 98se in the meantime?

 

[Guest]

For your motherboard, I would go with the Asus A7V266-E.
The DDR to get would be PC2100 with a CAS Latency of 2.0. I would check out Crucial's site for that.
XP is not a necessary upgrade. 98SE should work just fine. If you're gonna upgrade, I would go with Win2k. It's an easy upgrade, and it's fairly stable.
Hope this helps.

 

[lhgpoobaa]

i just read somewhere else that ATI doesnt actually support the radeion 8500 with win98!!!

so i would go with win2k.
all modern software works with it, is very stable, and doent have annoying things like product activation or the cheezy lookin desktop.

the xp1700+ is a nice chip
and any sis-735 or kt-266a based motherboard should do....
as for ram, any decent PC2100 cas2 ram... crucial, micron, corsiar, kingmax, kingston...
256mb is reccommended, 128 is a bit minimal, specially for todays apps and operating systems.
512 if your a big poweruser

OEMs selling "High End"PCs with integrated video will be forced into Q3tournaments using a TNT2M64!

 

[Guest]

Even if you aren't a big power user, I would go with 512 megs of RAM. It's right around $50, and it saves you from having to buy more in the future.