Help re: mobo/CPU upgrade?

[Bolman]

Hello.

I find myself needing to upgrade two old boxes, and would appreciate your opinions.

Currently, we're running P3/500s, with 256 MB RAM, 7200 rpm IDE drives, GeForce2MX and SoundBlaster Live! cards. I've got ATX cases with 340W power supplies.

Would like to upgrade these to something like an Athlon 1600+ or 1800+, with 512 Mb of RAM. In about five months, I plan to upgrade the video to GeForce4 4200-ish. These boxes will primarily be for online gaming. I don't plan to overclock, and my budget is tight. I have never owned a USB device, and don't plan to. With the eventually upgraded graphics, I'd like the useable lifespan of these boxes to be about two years (ha!).

Right now, I'm thinking of going with :

Athlon 1800+
Shuttle AK35GTR KT266A mobo
512 Mb Samsung or Crucial PC2100 DDR

Some questions:

Is there any real, significant performance increase in moving up to either:

a) a KT333 chipset
b) PC2700 DDR

Or, more to the point, would buying either a KT266A or PC2100 DDR be a bad investment?

Also, any opinions on the mobo? I've read good things about Shuttles.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Quetzacoatl]

There's negligable performance gains comparing the Kt266a to the Kt333, since essentially, the Kt333 is an improved Kt266a, and the Athlon is already saturated with Pc-266 DDR (2100mb/s). If you're not overclocking, the Geforce4 ti4200s are good value cards, but watch out for the Radeon 9500 late winter this year, a value version of the Radeon 9700. The advantage of a Kt333 board is they usually have more features than their Kt266a counterparts. In the end, it's more a matter of the money you're paying, and what features you're looking for (example, raid, onboard lan, 5.1 sound). Either way, it won't cost too much. If you want to really save money, get yourself a Pentium 4 1.8a Ghz, and overclock it. If you want strong stock performance, get an Athlon. Yes, Shuttle makes generally good motherboards, their Kt266a and Kt333 boards among the best, and least expensive.

Soon enough, Intel will make the i845s...imagine dual channel Sdram...*shudder*

 

[Crashman]

The easiest chipsets to work with are the SiS 735 and SiS 745 chipsets, they don't have the driver/PCI issues that occasionally pop up with VIA chipsets. Asus, Aopen, and MSI all have 745 boards, and they are all inexpensive.

You wouldn't notice a performance difference between the KT266A and KT333 because it doesn't really exist. Using PC2700 on the KT333 would give you a small performance gain, but still not noticeable, in the area of 3% max. And the SiS has similar performance to the KT266A.

Personally, I'd just upgrade the processors on the systems you have, and save myself the work of building a new system.

<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>