Building for future upgradability

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bullfrawg

Junior Member
Oct 4, 2006
19
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Does anyone have any tips for building a PC so it is upgradable for as long as possible? I would like to gradually swap in new parts, rather than throw the whole thing on the scrap heap in 3 or 4 years and start over. Any tips from those who have succeeded? Or is this just a pipe dream

My thoughts and questions, for your critique:
(1) I should build it myself. That way I'll be more confident about opening it up and replacing stuff.
(2) The things which need to be upgraded soonest will probably be main memory and the video card (assuming I want to do a little gaming now and then). A motherboard which will handle 4 GB and a PCIe x16 video card will probably allow one good upgrade easily.
(3) Is it reasonable to hope to make it beyond one memory upgrade and one video card upgrade? I'm hoping for two memory and video card upgrades, and one upgrade each for the CPU and the hard drive.
(4) The right motherboard seems to be the key. When one gets a new motherboard, one probably wants all new interfaces -- and then one needs new stuff that plugs into those interfaces. That's what I'm trying to avoid.
(5) SLI and Crossfire are probably not good upgrade paths. Sure, I could pick up a used matching video card on eBay, if I go with SLI. But the performance boost looks like maybe 30% if one is lucky, and one would need to pay now for a motherboard and power supply capable of handling that setup.
(6) How important are expansion slots? What do y'all think about extra PCIe x16 or x4 slots? Can I expect to buy non-video expansion cards for those slots in a few years, if I get a motherboard that has extra such slots? I don't know, USB3.0, LightningWire, SATA-V (because interfaces have sequels), Rocky IX -- (oops). Maybe GPGPU-type parallel-processing applications a la Folding@home (but for me)? Or should I just be content with assorted PCI and PCIe x1 slots? The PCIe x1 slots don't look that much better on paper . . . though I could be wrong.
(7) My guess is, a motherboard which can handle no more than 4 GB of memory will be made obsolete first by that restriction; therefore I plan to get one that can handle an eventual upgrade to 8 GB. I think this will be more important to the longevity of the motherboard than SATA-II, Socket AM2/AM3, and possibly PCIe x16.
(8) As you may have guessed, I'm leaning toward AMD. Yeah, Core 2 Duo is a bit faster. But the Athlon X2 3800 is cheaper, and only a bit slower, from the perspective of years before it would require and upgrade. And since AMD just switched to AM2, and since they say AM3 processors will be backwards compatible, I'm leaning that way, despite the excitement over Core 2 Duo. Not trying to be a fanboy -- Intel definitely has the best processor now. But AMD may have the best upgrade path for trailing-edge types like me.
(9) With my luck, when I want a new motherboard, ATX will be obsolete, and I won't even get to keep my case. (My last desktop case was baby-AT.) (I have a notebook now.)
(10) How many +12v amps on the power supply?
(11) Maybe my motherboard will burn up in 4 years anyway?

OK, that's enough for now. Gimme some flames, tell me why I'm wrong, and I'll love you for it.
 
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acegazda

Platinum Member
May 14, 2006
2,689
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I'd like to start by reminding you: there is no such thing as future-proofing. No matter how much you jack up your system, "they" will always come out with something to best your conifiguration.
Your quest for upgradability is a noble one though. The things you mentioned, swapping video cards, cpus, etc. is common to every new MoBo, but if you want RAM upgradability, the most DIMM slots you can get is 4, so buy 1gb sticks. That way, you can up to 4gb when the need arises.
So you want am2 ehh? I used to be in your shoes, however, I realized that c2d MoBos could be had for prices similar to am2 MoBos and the price difference of the cpus was only $20 for the x2 3800+ and the e6300. (the x2 3800+ actually went up in price over the last week).
If you must go with am2 however, two mobos to check out are the DFI am2 infinty and the MSI k9n platinum. The former should be an excellent overclocker, if that floats your boat, and the former is just solid, and a decent overclocker. Both seem to be above the RAM voltage issues that plague the midrange boards (see: asus m2n-e) and both are ~$100.
As for the psu, you want something of very high quality. For these power requirments (single gfx, 1 or 2 hdds, etc.) I would suggest either the enhance 5140gh or the enermax liberty 400w. The former is of very high quality, check out jonnyguru.com for a review, and the latter is modular and of similar quality. Both have ~30amps on the 12v rails combined, 28 and 30 respectively, which will be more than enough for a high end graphics card and an oc'ed cpu.
Hope this helped a little, welcome to the forums!:D
Lemme get you some links...
 
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acegazda

Platinum Member
May 14, 2006
2,689
1
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uhh... I think he said that he DIDN'T want sli or xfire. That's a lot of wattage for one gfx card... :D
Good cases though... jab-tech.com has the yate loons for $3.70 each, plus $3 shipping. The orange ones are cool!
 
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bullfrawg

Junior Member
Oct 4, 2006
19
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Thanks for the help y'all. I was looking more for general strategies than specific product recommendations, but those are great.

Regarding MSI k9n platinum -- really? Newegg's customer reviews showed a lot of people having troubles with the heatsinks overheating, and I was reading in some forums about getting some capacitor replaced. I was trying to stay away for that reason. I saw the sticky in the motherboard forum about the asus m2ne. I'm a bit puzzled about how to figure out what motherboards are good -- I wanted to go by newegg's customer reviews, but the m2ne gets mostly good reviews (though the memory issues certainly came up). It's hard to know how much stock to put in those.

I was considering the msi k9a platinum, for the cool-running ati crossfire express 3200 chipset. If I went with just 4 GB, the Biostar tForce 550 got good customer reviews. I'd like to stick with a chipset that "officially" supports AM2, because it might be more likely to support a CPU upgrade, especially to be forward-compatible with AM3. But the various EPOX and Gigabyte nForce 4 boards caught my eye, because they are cheap, and they support 16 GB -- probably overkill. That DFI board looks pretty sweet too, and if the MSI k9n is reliable, that could be a good option.

Nice lian li cases! I want one! With my luck, I'll spend lots on a nice case, and everyone will go BTX before my next motherboard. :) I got a pretty nice baby-AT case for my first computer. Didn't last a single upgrade. Doh!

BTW, sorry about the empty post -- tried to back out, and misunderstood a button.
 
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brikis98

Diamond Member
Jul 5, 2005
7,253
8
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well, if you use the computer for gaming and like to play with eye candy at high resolutions, in my experience, it's nearly impossible to "future" proof. the manufacturers are constantly changing the infrastructure: new motherboard layouts and power requirements, different CPU sockets, different memory types and speeds, different video card slots (PCI -> AGP 2x, 4x, 8x -> PCIe x16 -> SLI -> Crossfire), different video card power requirements, different storage device interfaces (SCSI, ATA, IDE, SATA, PATA), different IO hookups (PS/2, USB1.1 -> USB 2.0, firewire, D-SUB, VGA, HDMA), etc...

if it's not one thing, it will always be another... you can usually keep up for a year or two and still have very solid performance, but after that, you almost always need an almost completely new system to keep gaming at high res with eye candy. however, for those who don't game or only do it casually, you can get away with an older system for quite a bit longer. just leave plenty of room to upgrade your RAM, don't buy CPU's for sockets at the end of their life cycle, and get a solid PSU and you're fine :)
 
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