If you had to upgrade mobo/cpu?

MarTTy

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My Current set-up consists of the following....

Abit BD7-RAID Motherboard, ATA/133
Intel Pentium 4 1.6 GHz 512 Cache "Northwood"
Enermax 350w Whisper Quiet Power Supply
EKL PAPST CPU Fan
64Mb ATI Radeon 7200 OEM
Pinnacle TV Card
256MB DDR Ram
Maxtor IDE ATA-133 80GB 7200RPM
Toshiba IDE DVD SD-M1612
M-Audio Audiophile 2496
Midi Tower case
3.5" Floppy Disk Drive

The question is, I want to transfer most of the components to a new mobo, and maybe upgrade the graphics card and the pinnacle at the same time.......can anyone recommend a decent mobo/cpu combo that would complement my components? :)
 
If you want to stick to a P4 then IMHO a 3.0 or better Northwood's a good idea, generates less heat than a Prescott. I like ASUS boards and have a ASUS P4C800E which does what I need, has a little bit of clocking ability if you feel the need.
 
Another vote for P4C800E. I've built 7 systems with 'em and not had a bad one yet (with 3.2 Northwoods).
 
Given that you need a new CPU, memory, motherboard and graphics card I'd suggest that going for a motherboard upgrade would be a complete waste of money. FWIW, I have a P4 3.0c in an Abit IC7-G. Like the Asus recommended above, an overclockers' board, although I don't overclock as I think it's about as useful in the real World as squeezing zits.

If you intend to link your PC with an AV system I'd consider buying a ready built Dell, for about £500-00. I bought a Dell as a cheap backup to add to my home network. This has a 3GHz Pentium, 1Gb DDR ram and a PCIe radeon. It's performance is only marginally less than my main PC and it's more upgradeable. However, it's supreme virtue is that it is completely silent. I've spent an absolute fortune on adding silent cooling solutions to my Abit system and a great deal of time faffing about with it with limited success.

So my advice would be to save your money unitl you can upgrade your system. If you want to use you computer rather than to tinkering with it and discussing the marvels of Arctic Silver, FSB frequencies, memory latencies and bench marks, I'd avoid tweakers and their recommendations like the plague. But then again generating randoom numbers may be your thing. :smoke:
 
Sorry, can't agree about DELL. Sure, they're good value for the money as a one off for what you get, but you're upgrade path is limited largely to peripherals in view of the proprietary mainboard/memory/cooling etc and, of course, BIOS.

I agree about a P4 Northwood system and can also recommend ASUS P4C800-E D/L and Abit IC7-G. Fantastic performance from both with quality high performance memory, eg GEIL DDR550. The system will happily run 250-275+ FSB, upping CPU by about 1GHz and keeping CPU:RAM at 1:1 for a very stable system, so you can buy a 2.4 and run it at 3.3/4 no worries. All products probably easy to come by 2nd hand. Overclocking "as useful as squeezing zits", eh. I don't think so............

Also good for HCPC/HTPC/AVPC or whatever you want to call it, is SocketA Athlon (now 3200XP+ is quite cheap) with DFI LAN Party UltraB and high performance RAM for similar results. Even ASUS A7N8X-E D/L + standard DDR400 RAM (eg GEIL Value @ £100/Gig) will get you a good result, and again components available 2nd hand.

if you want to be at the cutting edge then AMD64Winchester/nForce4 PCIe (NOT SLI) is the only way to go, again with quality high performance memory, if poss, eg G.Skill or Mushkin (Corsair v. expensive), but not essential, subject to budget.
 
mephistopheles said:
I agree about a P4 Northwood system and can also recommend ASUS P4C800-E D/L and Abit IC7-G. Fantastic performance from both with quality high performance memory, eg GEIL DDR550. The system will happily run 250-275+ FSB, upping CPU by about 1GHz and keeping CPU:RAM at 1:1 for a very stable system, so you can buy a 2.4 and run it at 3.3/4 no worries. All products probably easy to come by 2nd hand. Overclocking "as useful as squeezing zits", eh. I don't think so............

.

Fine if you want to generate meaningless benchmarks but for an AV system or mainstream use these numbers mean nothing at all. I stand by my view on overclocking. If you look at the real economics of overclocking you'll understand this.

As for the upgradeability of current Dell models you may be surprised. I write as someone who for years did overclock. In the early days of the 486 and Pentium it was possible to make economic sense of overclocking. Now it does'nt. However, discussing the virtues of tiddling around with latencies, FSB etc. no longer entertains me and I have several well performing silent or near silent PCs to work and play on so we'll just have to agree to disagree.
 

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