I have an old compaq 5170 (pent. II 350), no AGP slot, PCI stealth 540 vid card. As you can see a crap system by todays standards. It's still useable for downloading movies, surfing the net and playing some decent games like diablo II and Terminus, but now I am at the end of the road as far as getting new games or even using DIVX, so I am looking to upgrade.
One option I am looking at is getting a performa 600 overdrive from evergreen which would take my system up to a celeron 600 though I am not sure how a celeron 600 would compare to a pentium II 350 since the 350 has double the cache. If anyone knows this, please give input. The performa 600 is currently about $35, so it's a really cheap alternative to keep my going a few more months.
My main question is about the new motherboards. I have decided my big CPU purchase will be the upcoming thourobred by AMD since it runs cooler, uses less power, will be faster than XP (333MHz bus) and will be good for overclocking when 2 MHz starts becoming obsolete. So will the new motherboards out now with the VIA266A or the NVIDIA chipsets be compatible with the thourobred? My main concern is the thourobred has a 166 FSB (333 actual) and the current motherboards wont support this and thus I would have to scrap this and buy a new one in a few months.
Another concern I have is I have heard the NVIDIA GEForce 4 card and the other upcoming crads will be using AGP 8X, while current motherboards only support AGP 4X. If this is still like 2 years down the road, I won't mind switching then, but if it is going to happen soon, I dont want to have to scrap a motherboard I just bought.
I am leaning towards the upcoming NVIDIA NFORCE without the integrated graphics as my choice since it seems to be a bit faster than the VIA266A and also has built in sound better than the best sound cards out there from what I have been reading. Any suggestions?
Also, I am getting a maxtor 40 gig HD with the 133 UMA speed and am wondering if it would be worth getting a motherboard that supports this or just ass the 133 card for another $40 since the NFORCE wont support it. I was also worried that this HD might become obsolete soon- has anyone heard if IDE drives will be shipping in the near future faster than 7200 RPM? I am worried cause my 5400 RPM drive became dated almost the day after I got it.
As far as RAM goes, I was thinking of the 2700 DDR ram so I can still use it with the newer thourobred with its 333 MHz bus speed. Is 2700 fast enough?
So, right now my idea is to get from newegg- a good case, a good MB, a HD, good DDR ram and then putting a cheap duron 950 processor in it and using that till the new thourobreds hit a decent price point (about 5 months from now I am guessing). Any suggestions would be welcome.
P.S.-sorry for any mispellings or wrong useage of terminology, I am pretty much a computer newbie.
One option I am looking at is getting a performa 600 overdrive from evergreen which would take my system up to a celeron 600 though I am not sure how a celeron 600 would compare to a pentium II 350 since the 350 has double the cache. If anyone knows this, please give input. The performa 600 is currently about $35, so it's a really cheap alternative to keep my going a few more months.
My main question is about the new motherboards. I have decided my big CPU purchase will be the upcoming thourobred by AMD since it runs cooler, uses less power, will be faster than XP (333MHz bus) and will be good for overclocking when 2 MHz starts becoming obsolete. So will the new motherboards out now with the VIA266A or the NVIDIA chipsets be compatible with the thourobred? My main concern is the thourobred has a 166 FSB (333 actual) and the current motherboards wont support this and thus I would have to scrap this and buy a new one in a few months.
Another concern I have is I have heard the NVIDIA GEForce 4 card and the other upcoming crads will be using AGP 8X, while current motherboards only support AGP 4X. If this is still like 2 years down the road, I won't mind switching then, but if it is going to happen soon, I dont want to have to scrap a motherboard I just bought.
I am leaning towards the upcoming NVIDIA NFORCE without the integrated graphics as my choice since it seems to be a bit faster than the VIA266A and also has built in sound better than the best sound cards out there from what I have been reading. Any suggestions?
Also, I am getting a maxtor 40 gig HD with the 133 UMA speed and am wondering if it would be worth getting a motherboard that supports this or just ass the 133 card for another $40 since the NFORCE wont support it. I was also worried that this HD might become obsolete soon- has anyone heard if IDE drives will be shipping in the near future faster than 7200 RPM? I am worried cause my 5400 RPM drive became dated almost the day after I got it.
As far as RAM goes, I was thinking of the 2700 DDR ram so I can still use it with the newer thourobred with its 333 MHz bus speed. Is 2700 fast enough?
So, right now my idea is to get from newegg- a good case, a good MB, a HD, good DDR ram and then putting a cheap duron 950 processor in it and using that till the new thourobreds hit a decent price point (about 5 months from now I am guessing). Any suggestions would be welcome.
P.S.-sorry for any mispellings or wrong useage of terminology, I am pretty much a computer newbie.
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