upgrade questions

Hellrazer

Can anyone help wiyh a question I have about upgrading my Pc.I currently have a p3 600 slot 1 and in my quest for speed I have now decided to upgrade my mobo.There is a previous thread here from my self regarding a 1gig slot 1 but I couldnt get it to work in my mobo(tabor 3).So what im asking is what can people recommend in an upgrade for around 250euro.I am looking at going down the road of AMD,and was wondering what specs are the best for this price.Also does anyone know if I can buy the "powerleap upgrade for slot 1 systems"here in Ireland.
And what do people think of these slotket upgrades.The particular one I am talking about is a Tualatin Celeron 2 which was featured in a thread some where on these boards.Or should I just continue with what I have and wait and buy a complete new Pc in a few months when this will be more affordable.
Thanks.

Inspector Gadget

richie18:

As there are a number of Socket370 boards that don't support Tualatin chips (the only one that easily springs to mind is Shuttle's FV24, but there are a number of others too) I wouldn't hold out much hope of a Slot 1 Mobo doing the deed; there'd have to be a BIOS upgrade to cater for this and the mobo manufacturer would have to be bothered to do it, and seeing as they might lose sales over it, they probably wouldn't bother.

Otherwise, if you are planning to upgrade, and go AMD, I reckon a ~1GHz Duron is fast enough for most things, unless you're planning on SETI@Home or encoding video or something CPU-intensive like that. The only thing is that the current generation of AMD mobos require DDR RAM, and the stuff in your PIII 600 won't work in there. If your ram is PC133, however (if you have a PIII 600e it does 133 FSB, IIRC) you might want to get a board that will do that.

One solution is to get a mobo that supports both; Marx (http://www.marx-computers.com/) do an Elite K7S5A mobo that supports DDR and SDR (your stuff), and has all the bells and whistles, including onboard audio; I've never seen or used it, but I'm sure it'll be fine for everyday stuff if you don't want to overclock it. That's €110. Remember that the sooner you upgrade to DDR ram, the sooner you'll get the full speed the new system is capable of.

A Duron 1.2GHz, featuring the new Spitfire core (all the same enhancements as the Athlon XP but with reduced default FSB and smaller cache) is €130; that leaves you about €10 to invest in a new CPU cooler - they go from €15 up, but I wasn't far off your target, was I?

I'm sure you can better those prices if you look around - Marx was the first place I found in my browser cache. There's a sticky on the subject somewhere - it's either in this thread or the technology one.

One last point of note; AMD CPUs, while cheaper than their Intel equivalents, run hotter, and as such need efficient cooling. This means that you NEVER run them without a CPU fan (unless you have a huge heatsink), you ALWAYS use thermal paste (goo that goes between CPU and heatsink to ensure proper heat transfer - a tube of it costs a couple of quid, sorry, euros, from Peats or Maplin)

Oh, and always use an antistatic strap when handling static sensitive stuff like CPUs. If you don't know what one of those is, post a question to the forums and someone will fill you in on what it is and how to use it.

Happy hunting,
Gadget

astrofool

if possible get a Via motherboard (kt133/kt266 etc.) and avoid the SiS boards for a while till they come on par with intel/via for compatability (not that Via are the best, but in the last year they have improved 1000%)

SiS boards are cheap, but need time to be refined, Via is now pushing performance, and are relatively cheap, spend the extra £20 and get a Via board, time saved in getting it working will be well worth it.

wait a year to get an SiS