I need advice on how to upgrade my PC (Athlon)

[toysnob]

in Jan 2002 I bought a PC with an AMD 1800+, 2GB of 266mhz RAM and I believe a VIA 266 something or other based mobo. I have upgraded the GPU throughout the years and it currently sports a 128MB Radeon 9800 board, one that actually came from ATI themselves (on their dev list). On the storage end of things, I have a 100GB WD drive with either 2MB or 8MB cache, and a Pioneer 104 2X DVD -R burner and an everyday 16x CD-ROM.

One important issue is the power source in my PC, which sometimes makes a whirring sound and recently I've been getting burn errors with Nero that say there are power related issues, presumably affecting my Pioneer.

So overall I am looking to upgrade my PC to allow me to do several things:

- Run the NVidia 6800 series cards (meaning I want to have the available bandwidth on the CPU bus to support it)

- Support a 300 or 400GB drive.

- Fix my power/fan problem.

Any suggestions on what to get in terms of mobos, chips, ram speed, etc?

 

[TwoBills]

First thing I'd do is throw an Enermax 350w psu in there. The 64 bit people will be along shortly.

 

[masshass81]

How much are you looking to spend?

 

[miketheidiot]

new powersupply probably 380watt antec or so, and the geforce should have no problem in there. You might want to do a llittle overclocking if you haven't already, or grab a faster processor, or both. A higher speed athlonxp should be enough to keep up with a 6800 gt. Of course if your looking at spending a lot of money then new possiblities open up

 

[Gurck]

Definitely a new power supply. You're looking at a faster chip (and mobo to go with it) too, if you don't want it bottlenecking the 6800gt. All current chips run at a 200mhz system bus, requiring pc3200 (400mhz ddr) ram to run at stock speed, faster to overclock, so you're also looking at new ram. Why do you have 2gb ram? Even modern gaming systems need only one. What do you have to spend?

 

[ScrewFace]

I think future games like Unreal3 and Quake4 will need 2GB of RAM. Heck, MaximumPC says you should have 2GB of system RAM just for Doom3!

 

[toysnob]

Thanks for all the feedback, I will digest it but for now to answer the questions:

1) How much am I looking to spend? Answer - $500, give or take..
2) Why did I have 2GB of RAM? I am a developer (of 3D apps) and I used the system for high end modelling and animation tools like Softimage and Houdini. 2GB was not enough

 

[toysnob]

Btw, it sounds like I need a completely new Mobo, RAM and CPU.. plus power supply.. I am wondering if its smarter for me to just upgrade the power supply in this PC and just buy a completely new PC later this winter. Or is it possible to upgrade this within $500 and still make it 6800 capable?

 

[Gurck]

Originally posted by: toysnob
Btw, it sounds like I need a completely new Mobo, RAM and CPU.. plus power supply.. I am wondering if its smarter for me to just upgrade the power supply in this PC and just buy a completely new PC later this winter. Or is it possible to upgrade this within $500 and still make it 6800 capable?

Depends on budget but yes, if you can swing it financially, building an entirely new rig would be a good bet. And it never hurts to have a spare around.