Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Computer Upgrade Question

Hi, am soooo sure there are some folk here who have a handle on this stuff so here goes:

Currently running a TIRED PIII 500, Asus P3B-F board, 256 PC133 ram, bla bla bla and of course my OLD faithful W98SE (which I won't give up).

Would like to upgrade to what most would consider 'still outdated' stuff. Maybe to PIII 800 or 1000 or go Athlon1000. The current mbd is at it's capacity as far as processors go so both mbd and processor need to be changed out to get more zzzzooooom.

Can, or better yet, would you impart some wisdom. Would definitely like to keep my old Voodoo5500 v-card, hd (3 of them), cd and cd burner, floppy.. bla bla and reuse my memory.
Any particular mbd model and processor I should be shopping for? What are the odds of finding new goods?

Much thanks for anyone's 2 cents.

pc133 memory should work with motherboards/cpu's of up to 1ghz. After that I believe they started using DDR/RDRAM. You can get intel boards with p4's that still use pc133 memory, but since speed doesn't seem to be that much of an issue you should be able to pick up a p3 1ghz and board off ebay pretty darn cheap.

Heck my Dell P4 1.8Ghz uses PC133 FWIW

TB

I just built my roomate a decent system for around $400. Its a AMD Athalon XP 2.1Ghz, AOpen motherboard AOpen Video card w/ 128mb DDR Ram, um... 120gb hard drive, CD burner, 512mb DDR System Ram, and some other goodies. My house was struck by lightning and it fried everything in his room. He is still fighting with the company who made his surge protector (who will remain nameless, NEWPOINT!) to get them to reimburse him for his damages.

I on the other hand have a 12 hour uninteruptable power supply (battery backup) that I scraped up off Ebay for just shy of $200. Those things are great. The power goes off and BAM it switches to the batterys and your PC doesn't even hiccup.

Well anyway everything is going down in price so you should be able to find something alot better than a PIII.

You might want to check out Overstock.com

I noticed a few desktops over there for under $300.

However, if you're spending that kind of money, it probably makes sense to look into a new Dell. Those things are so cheap nowadays.

Don't get a Dell, have someone build you one. So much better!!!!

You know, I used to say this. My Dell 2300 has been rock solid for 2 years.

Sure I don't game, or anything like that. But two years ago, I got a P4 1.8GHz with 784MB of RAM and a 40GB hard drive shipped to my home for $500.

I added another 120GB drive I had in a removable drive tray I put in the box.

No crashes, no windows re-installs, no driver conflicts.

It just works.

I can build computers all day long, and did have a dual PIII processor SCSI disk workstation before that, and prefer the rock solid performance of the dell over the bleeding edge hell of my homemade systems.

But then I work on computers for a living, so I wanted one that just worked. Other than my Sun workstations, my Dell has been really solid and worth the $$$ to me.

TB

I agree, some of the older dell machines are rock solid, but I build my own...my current machine has been running for 3 years now with no problems. It's hit or miss with computers man!

That mobo can take a slotket card (~$20 USD)and a CELERON 2 1100mhz FCPGA (got mine for less than $100 CDN last year).

This runs at 1100mhz natively, but moving your bus speed to 133 should give you 1467mhz provided you really have PC133 ram (not PC100).

That would be your cheapest option, if you can find that stuff. Asus itself has a stotket card for that board (S370-133 I believe), but any will work...