Upgrade Please Help

If your Athlon is running on a DDR board, then I'd suggest the following:

Suggestion 1) If you <i>don't</i> overclock, then go with an AXP2200+ and as much CAS2 PC2100 as you can afford. Unless you OC, anything over PC2100 is generally a waste because the AXP's 2x133MHz FSB becomes a bottleneck for the bandwidth of the RAM. (And so the only performance gain you see at all is purely from the latency improvement, which is minimal.)

Suggestion 2) If you <i>do</i> overclock, then wait a month for the AXP 2400+ to come out and get as much CAS2 PC2700 as you can afford. (But try to get only 2 sticks <i>at most</i> because from what I've heard and read, DDR doesn't like a lot of sticks at 333MHz and likes even less at 400MHz.) So get higher density sticks.

Now, if your current Athlon is <i>not</i> running on DDR (unlikely, but possible as some people do still have SDR Athlon systems, especially ones as old as yours sounds) then you're going to have to replace the mobo, the RAM, and the CPU to make it worth it. That'll get expensive and leaves you pretty much as open to a good Intel box as a good AMD box. And then, the sky is the limit. Heh heh.

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Well then I guess to best help you, we have to know more about what you have and what you feel capable of working with? (Hopefully other people will eventually be offering helpful suggestions soon too.)

1) Are you planning on keeping any old components? (Such as case, power supply, CD ROMs, hard drives, etc.) If so, please list them all.

2) Do you have a preference for Intel or AMD?

3) Do you feel comformatble with overclocking?

4) Can you give us a good estimate of the kind of money that you have to spend on this upgrade?

5) How important is future upgradability to you?

6) Exactly what is the PC used for? (Such as for gaming, for video work, for 3D rendering, for office apps, for web surfing, etc.) If numerous answers, please try to rate them by how important each is to you.

7) What is the average summer-time room temperature for where your PC sits?

I know that you have already sort-of answered some of these, but you seem most concerned about price, which sometimes you might be surprised about with Intel solutions if you're open.

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Ocing an Athlon well isn't the easiest of tasks lately. Generally the 'easy' way to do it is to buy one with a low enough multiplier that when you change the FSB there is still enough headroom in the core that the processor still runs and is stable. Unfortunately, picking out Athlons to do this isn't always the easiest. If you can wait the month or so for the AXP 2400+, you'll probably have good luck there since it is the first CPU to use AMD's newest core revision so it <i>should</i> have a lot of headroom.

Otherwise it would be best to surf a few OCing sites or ask around here for specific Athlon batch designations to look for. Ideally though, you'll want to OC the Athlon's FSB to 166MHz and use CAS 2 PC2700 RAM in a KT333 motherboard since then you don't have to 'unlock' the Athlon's multiplier.

For this kind of an OC, a KT400 motherboard would work just as well as a KT333 or a KT266A because your FSB to mem clock ratio is still 1:1 if you OC the Athlon to a 2x166MHz FSB, so you shouldn't have any problems with the DDR333 memory. So only go for the KT400 if you really need other features. (Such as AGP 8x.)

For a guaranteed easy OC, look for a P4 Northwood 1.8a. It natively has a 100MHz FSB. So if you then change the FSB setting on the motherboard/in BIOS to 133MHz, you've just gotten yourself a darn cheap 2.4GHz P4b. I haven't yet heard of this OC not working because Intel downbinned so many of the Northwoods to make the 1.6a and 1.8a that they all seem to have a LOT of headroom left to OC with.

If you do use the 1.8a P4 OC, then I really stress the usefulness of an i850E motherboard and PC1066 RDRAM. It is the only combination that will give a 4x133MHz FSB P4 the bandwidth that it needs. I'd suggest 32ns Kingston PC1066.

However, if PC1066 RDRAM is far too expensive for you, many lucky people have also managed to successfully OC 40ns Samsung PC800 modules to run as PC1066 modules. They won't perform <i>quite</i> as well, but they should do the job much better than DDR or PC800 at stock.

Anywho, if you want to avoid the RDRAM, then I really have to suggest using AMD because the P4 really needs more bandwidth than DDR provides. Some software isn't hurt by this, but some is.

And if you do go the AMD route and can't afford true CAS2 PC2700, then I suggest attempting to run the CAS 2.5 memory at CAS2 settings anyway. A lot of the time this still works and it can make a performance difference.

And either system <i>may</i> need a new power supply. 300W is pushing it, especially with a Radeon 9700. It all depends. I'd suggest trying out your old PS, and if the system is unstable then try replacing it with a quality 350W or higher first. Hopefully though, it'll do.

And eventually, you'll probably want to pick up a new hard drive. Currently, the special edition Western Digitals are everyone's favorites because they have an 8MB cache and spin at 7200RPM. But hey, upgrades like that can wait.

And I think the rest of your old parts should do fine. Good luck, and may the Force be with you.

<pre><A HREF="http://www.nuklearpower.com/comic/186.htm" target="_new"><font color=red>It's all relative...</font color=red></A></pre><p>

You're welcome. I hope the new system goes smoothly. It seems there's a lot of simple OC tricks to gain a lot of performance out of less expensive parts these days if you just know what to look for.

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