Advice for budget-concious PC ugrade

[Adrian Tung]

Hi guys,

I am finally deciding to upgrade my aging Pentium-MMX PC but I am on an extremely tight bugdet. This is what I am planning to buy:

Celeron
Asus P3V4X
128Mb PC100 SDRAM
some full tower ATX casing / 300W PS

Later next month I am planning to get a GeForce 2 and the month after that, a good DVD drive. I already have 128Mb of RAM (so the upgrade would bring me up to 256Mb), an SB Live! card, a bunch of IDE drives (2 hard drives, a CD-ROM and a CD-RW) and 17" monitor.

For the Celeron processor that I am getting, I plan to get something cheap and slow (perhaps 400Mhz) since I heard that the max for the Celerons are 600Mhz, so it would not make any sense to buy a faster one that cannot overclock.

Any comments/tips/advice?

Thanx in advance!
atwl

 

[riceboi5]

Spend the extra $40 over the C400 and get the c2-533 and OC it to 800+ mhz.

I have mine running at 896mhz @ 1.65v

 

[Edwardo]

I would wait for the Asus board to come out for the Duron. The price of a Duron.mobo for it will cost the same as a that Celly setup you are looking at. Furthermore, you won't need the extra 256MB's of RAM if you are only running win98. That is a waste. You will see practically no improvements in performance.

 

[Jimbo]

For how you want to proceed I think a wiser choice would be this:

Motherboard: ASUS CUSL2 815e chipset. This will give you on-board video and sound while you are saving up for that G Force-2.

Like Edwardo says, skip the extra stick of 128 for now. That should save you about $150+ right there and allow you to spend a little more on QUALITY components that you won't regret buying later. In Win98 128MB is fine unless you work a lot with Photoshop and scanned images.

Get a decent case and power supply. I think that Mushkin's MinMaw mid-tower is a great case for the money (my personal all-time favorite). The build quality is superior to PC Power and Cooling's mid-tower case.
Here is link to it:
http://www.mushkin.com/cgi-bin/Mushkin.filereader?39656c800577f486273fcdaa9b020705+EN/products/990300
If you feel that you need a higher output power supply, another good option is the Enlight 7237 mid-tower/Enermax 350W from Russ at Compucheap http://www.compucheap.com/cgibin/shopcart/shopper.cgi?defaction=search&keywords=misc

Finally the processor: If you have the money go with a 550e for about $65 more that the Slot-One Celeron 400. It should hit 733 on that board with out breaking a sweat and will give you generally better performance than anything you would see on a Celeron.

Good luck and let us know how things go!

Jimbo

 

[Adrian Tung]

Thanks for all your suggestions so far.

BTW, now I am using 192Mb in Win2K Pro (the old 64Mb PC66 stick has to go with my new setup), I sometimes deal with large, scanned photoshop images , and more importantly I deal with large SoundFont files which need me to have more free RAM. So the RAM is important for me.


atwl