Looking for a good way to upgrade my system

[Elector]

Hi there, first time posting here. 🙂

Right now I've got a AMD XP 2400+, Asus A7N8X, 2 x 512MB Kingston Hyper-X PC3000 DDR, ATI Radeon 9600 AGP and a bunch of other stuff that's not importaint to this upgrade.

I'm looking at buying a Intel P4 3.4GHz Prescott, and for that I of course need some MB, RAM, GFX and other hardware, but I can't quite work out what's the best at the time beeing, so I hope you guys can help me in choosing.

I think the Asus P5P800 motherboard looks nice, and it seems to have the features I need, eg. AGP and ATA. But is it any good?

What about RAM, do I have to ugrade that now as well, or can I reuse my "old" PC3000 DDR ram, without losing (much) speed and will the CPU even work at 3.4GHz if I use that?

About my GFX card, I don?t game that much, except from older games that doesn?t requier the new-new-new technology, so I would like to avoid the extra cost of a new PCI Express gfx-card, and reuse my old done. By that I suppose the newer i915x and i925x chipsets are out of the question, or am I overlooking something?

 

[Elector]

Cough, reply d*mit! 🙂

I suppose DDR2 would get some extra speed out of it, but isn't it just a few % extra, not like 20% or something?

 

[globalcitizen]

Your system is good enough as it is. The upgrades you suggest will not increase performance at all. If you still want to upgrade you can keep almost everything if you plan on saving money. But the system is good enough as it is.

 

[Elector]

Well, it's not enough IMO. I mostly use it for encoding video, and from what I can gather, first of all a P4 is faster at that, and the extra MHz will only do better.

 

[gobucks]

I'm gonna try not to sound like an AMD zealot, but I'd recommend against a Prescott. In fact, I'd go so far as to recommend not buying anything from Intel until they get a Pentium M on the desktop with decent floating point performance and 64-bit support. But back to my previous point, the only real reason for a prescott is if you do nothing but media encoding all day, which I kinda doubt. Otherwise, the A64 dominates in games and workstation applications. Prescott just doesn't seem to have much to offer. It's performance is not great, it runs like a furnace (if you plan to overclock, you'd better get some liquid cooling), and it's DDR2 support brings it absolutely no advantages. Considering intel's bus is still at 800MHz, and won't increase for a while yet, the extra bandwidth is wasted, and what you effectively have is high-latency, expensive DDR400, unless you can overclock to a 1066MHz FSB. Honestly, though, I'd just hang tight until near christmas, it seems like all the new stuff for all the sockets will be out and in good supply by then. On the AMD front, PCI-express, SLI, SATA-II support, and reasonably priced socket 939 processors will all be ready to go, and I expect this will influence prices from Intel, as well. My opinion is that we're about 3 weeks away from a great window of opportunity for PC buying. Socket 939 and LGA775 platforms will be fully robust, with a range of products for them, and these are the platforms which will be the heirs to the Socket A throne. PCI-express is the future, and if you are buying a new card now, it's in your best interest to buy a PCIe one, unless you never plan to upgrade your card for as long as you own your computer. Besides, your system does not seem to be in dire need of replacement, (tell ya what, I'll trade you for my current system, a 700MHz Athlon slot A computer, lol), so you have the luxary of being able to get by until AMD and Intel pony up and offer a platform with all the new technologies.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

The only item in your existing setup that is particularly outside of "plenty fast already" is the graphics, and you say that graphic speed means little to you. What specifically is causing you concern? You already should have the capability of running a new, very fast, SATA Hdd with that MB, and drive speeds were lagging behind CPU's pretty far a few months ago. Maybe you have a too-slow Hdd.


😕

 

[Elector]

You both make good points, but...

As far as office applications and games, they run pretty fast as it is now, so they don't need to run faster. Of course it would be nice, but it's the video encoding that's the main reason for my upgrade. I'm actually quite happy with my AMD, and has been since I installed it, but compared to what other CPUs there are out there t's just too slow IMO, for video editing/encoding that is.

About HD's, well I have some fairly fast IDE drives, and a 10000rpm SCSI U160 drive as system-drive, so that's not really a issue.


Anyways, instead of trying to talk me out of buying this, I hope you guys can help me with some good pointers about my questions.

1. Is the Motherboard any good?
2. Can I reuse my RAM, or do I have to get some new of that as well?