A major comp over haul

Jabba_the_SLUT

Right.i have an :

AMD Atlon 700 mhz
128 RAM
ATI 128 Rage 32 megs
20 gigs

These are the 4 main areas of my comp i want to upgrade and im looking for recommendations
i.e cheap prices and decent hardware.
Do i need 2 upgrade? wud it b worth my while or will i just wait? i need help from ppl who r experienced at doing this plz.

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Voulez vous coucher avec moi ce soir

Red Moose

Depends on what you want to do but generally:

1. CPU
700MHz is plenty for games and such, but is not so hot if you are doing heavy graphics work (unlikely) for CAD and so on.

2. RAM
Check how much your mobo can support and max it out. 128MB DIMM will cost you around £17 sterling ex VAT from here: http://www.crucial.com/uk/

My advice for utter coolness and r3zp3ct (!) would be to get 3/4 GB of RAM and boot your OS of a RAM drive. Windows 98 should take around 256MB to hold itself (yes all of it) in RAM, and your system will be freakishly fast.

Graphics Card:
OK, your card is pretty basic by todays NVidia-set market. Get a GF2 or more, but my own opinion would be to go for the GF2mx, which can have two video outputs to even two separate LCD monitors, a separate TV-out and separate TV-in for mad games on your widescreen TV and ability to TV-in to record TV to the HD, and encode to DivX and basically have digital recording of whatever you want (CPU of 1.2GHz+ would help this a lot).

Note that the TwinView thing from NVidia to drive two outputs is exclusive to the MX GeForce 2, and is just simply not available on the full GF2 or GF3 (so there!)

HD? Plenty if you use one OS (say Windows ME or something). If you plan on using another get another one. Maybe £100 ex VAT Irish Punts for another 20GB drive.

But if you really want to upgrade go for a kick ass SCSI card (with 80GB/sec bandwidth!) and get set up properly with that.

If you do all of the above it will kick the ass off of any system that has a 10GHz CPU and 256MB RAM and same HD and a GF2.

Also, you'd be ordering over the net to get the prices, and as far as I have read and seen, no Irish store supplies the cool GF2mx with the extra ports, because lets face it places like Game were trying to pawn a 64MB GF2 for £499 around 4 months ago so everything you see here (as far as I am concerned) in a shop is a rip off (especially RAM if you check out Crucial UK in the link above).

Extra bit in the edit: the GF2mx is about 30% less powerful compared to a "full" GF2, but the type I am speaking of can be ordered from Dabs for around £110 sterling. Also, I made a mistake about the TV-in, which is not on it or available at all.

[This message has been edited by Red Moose (edited 17-07-2001).]

chernobyl

Get a solid state hard disk, there only about £200,000 for 8GB.

Athlon sux, go for Intel.
but your processor is fine at the moment (speed wise..), what are you upgrading it for :-gaming,multimedia,general overhaul?

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Ashley Lyn Cafagna

Jabba_the_SLUT

Jaysus! ta very much lads. i'll b using the comp 4 gaming mostly but when i go 2 college ill need a damn fine comp which is y i brought this up. Moose how much is what ur suggesting gonna set me back (give or take)

[This message has been edited by Jabba_the_SLUT (edited 17-07-2001).]

JustHalf

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Red Moose:
1. CPU
700MHz is plenty for games and such, but is not so hot if you are doing heavy graphics work (unlikely) for CAD and so on.</font>

Depends on what your playing. Believe it or not some games are actually SLOW on even faster machines-like Delta Force 2.

A 700MHz should be plenty, but if you get a new chip you should get a new board. Chances are your board doesn't support a 133MHz FSB, which you'll want

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Red Moose:
Check how much your mobo can support and max it out. 128MB DIMM will cost you around £17 sterling ex VAT from here: http://www.crucial.com/uk/</font>

And what type of RAM it takes. There's a few good DDR boards out, but I'll cede authority on this to Gerry.

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Red Moose:
My advice for utter coolness and r3zp3ct (!) would be to get 3/4 GB of RAM and boot your OS of a RAM drive. Windows 98 should take around 256MB to hold itself (yes all of it) in RAM, and your system will be freakishly fast.</font>

Yeah, because Windows 98 can support that much RAM. Deadly.

This isn't going to get you respect, merely slaps for running such a terrible OS on a leet box. It's not good enough to be leet, and it's not old and crap enough to be leet.

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Red Moose:
OK, your card is pretty basic by todays NVidia-set market. Get a GF2 or more, but my own opinion would be to go for the GF2mx, which can have two video outputs to even two separate LCD monitors, a separate TV-out and separate TV-in for mad games on your widescreen TV and ability to TV-in to record TV to the HD, and encode to DivX and basically have digital recording of whatever you want (CPU of 1.2GHz+ would help this a lot).</font>

But does he need this?

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Red Moose:
Note that the TwinView thing from NVidia to drive two outputs is exclusive to the MX GeForce 2, and is just simply not available on the full GF2 or GF3 (so there!)</font>

I doubt that you'd buy a GeForce2MX for the TV OUT is you could afford a GeForce3.

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Red Moose:
HD? Plenty if you use one OS (say Windows ME or something). If you plan on using another get another one. Maybe £100 ex VAT Irish Punts for another 20GB drive.</font>

Or you might want to get a new drive altogether. Last I checked IT Direct were selling Quantum 40GB Fireball AS drives for 170 quid, and they're quite nice.

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Red Moose:
But if you really want to upgrade go for a kick ass SCSI card (with 80GB/sec bandwidth!) and get set up properly with that.</font>

This is ludicrous. The SCSI card will be in a PCI slot, and will only support that amount of data transfer. You have nowhere NEAR 80Gb of bandwidth across your PCI bus.

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Red Moose:
If you do all of the above it will kick the ass off of any system that has a 10GHz CPU and 256MB RAM and same HD and a GF2.</font>

Of course, there HAS been a glut of 10GHz CPU's out.

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Red Moose:
Extra bit in the edit: the GF2mx is about 30% less powerful compared to a "full" GF2, but the type I am speaking of can be ordered from Dabs for around £110 sterling. Also, I made a mistake about the TV-in, which is not on it or available at all.</font>

It's near to 37.5% less powerful, when both cards are pumped to the max. Get a GTS, ULTRA, or GeForce3 if you can!

Gerry

why are you recommending a geforce2 mx red moose? It is half as fast as a geforce2 gts, not 30% slower. Take a look here:

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1453&p=5

If you want to do video editing, get an ati radeon vivo.

As for the original question, well I don't know if you need to upgrade. Do your programs run slowly? Do games run slowly? If they are ok, well there is no need to upgrade. Just because technology has moved on, theres no pressure to slash out on a new machine. Consider spending money on making your existing setup better. Save up for a nice trinitron monitor.

If you decide you need a new machine, well right now I'd go for a new motherboard based on the amd 760 chipset, I'd recommend the epox 8k7a+, or the gigabyte 7ADXR. If you won't be overclocking, get a 1.33ghz or 1.4ghz tbird. Otherwise you could get away with overclocking a 1ghz 'axia' tbird. The new palomino offers a reasonable speedup for games, it is available in a 1.2ghz version right now, and you could clock that up.

In the next few months we will have p4's running at 2ghz+ and they are good for games, just a little costly right now.

Yurmasyurda

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Jabba_the_SLUT:
Right.i have an :

AMD Atlon 700 mhz
128 RAM
ATI 128 Rage 32 megs
20 gigs

These are the 4 main areas of my comp i want to upgrade and im looking for recommendations
i.e cheap prices and decent hardware.
Do i need 2 upgrade? wud it b worth my while or will i just wait? i need help from ppl who r experienced at doing this plz.

</font>

Pop over here if you want to buy my upgraded system parts for a total overhaul on your machine, I have upgraded recently to obscene hardware that would make you wet your pants .


http://www.boards.ie/bulletin/Forum5/HTML/000760.html

Yurma