Good Upgrade?

[Athlon4all]

I've been just sitting here thinking about what I could do to upgrade my rig (For $80-100 at the most), and I'm just wondering weather it would be worth it. Right now I'm using a ECS KM133 board and using ProSavage video, 128MB PC133 CL2 RAM, and a Duron 800 @ 880MHz (Soon to be 950-1GHz), Here's what I'm thinking I've got a spare Trident '97 PCI Video Card around, and here's what I'm thinking I buy a K7S5A, and a 128MB more of Crucial PC133 CL2, throw in the Trident '97 and oc the Duron to 150x6.5. I'm not much of a game player (ProSavage suits me fine for what I do play, I play Interplay's SFC: Orion Pirates (Just a 3D/2D RTS game)and EA Sports NBA Live 2000), so I'm mostly office and Web stuff. So here's my 3 q's:

1. Will I get a significant performance increase by going with K7S5A+150MHz oced fsb Duron but still with SDR over the same CPU speed, but running at 110MHz fsb that i'm doing now on KM133?
2. I can experiment this myself, but what kind of a performance loss will I suffer in my games by using Trident '97? Would I be better off getting a nVidia TNT2 or similar card?

Thanks 🙂

P.S. Another Q, I've heard that there is a Ocer's BIOS for K7S5A, what's it's features over the normal one? Thanks

 

[igowerf]

The O/C'er BIOS gives you a few more fsb speeds to work with (133/138/150/166.. can't remember the ones below 133). You'll probably see a increase but it's hardly worth the 70 bucks unless you plan to upgrade other stuff too. Instead of a TNT2, why not get a GeForce 2 MX? You can get a nice eVGA one with 5ns RAM for only 64 bucks.

 

[nocash]

I doubt if that duron will do much better with the k7s5a. You still wouldn't be able to change multiplier or voltage. The duron core usually will max out around 950-1000. so 8x133 would be highly unlikely without voltage adjustments. If you are not into 3d the onboard should be fine. I have played with that board a few times. best bet would get some more ram for your system 256 megs of crucial is too cheap to pass up. The trident would be way slower than the onboard. Using sdram with the 735 board would be a waste. As I doubt if you could see any improvement from your current board.

keep your board upgrade it next time you get the itch. and you can take the gfmx with it
256 megs $35 crucial
gfmx $63 from newegg

 

[Athlon4all]

Well I can't change multiplier of voltage on my current board either. I'd use the L6 and L7 Bridges for this. $70 is a lot, but the biggest upgrade I would do beyond this would be to DDR and this makes sense to go with this board because it performs well both with SDR and DDR. Yeah, I probably would be better off with just More RAM, and if anything a Storage Interface upgrade (Like IDE RAID, or SCSI). Thanks, anybody else?