need help upgrading an old system with a cyrix mII 266 processor.

[$pade]

What's in it right now:

mII 266 cyrix
s3 virgo video card
on board sound
motherboard(packard bell i think it has a vx chipset not sure though)
32 megs of edo ram (i believe its edo ram)
packard bell mini tower

budget is 200 dollars but the less the better.

and I need to upgrade it so that it can play the latest non 3d games (especially diablo 2)fairly smoothly. but of course 3d capabilities would be nice.

How should i do this about this?

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

Holy hell, your gonna end up scrapping that entire system. You might want to start with a low-end duron/kt133 or celeron2/i815 (or even an older i440BX chipset)

Ok a quick looksee at pricewatch...
AMD:
Duron 600mhz ~$40
K7-807 KT133 MB ~$80
64MB generic pc133 RAM ~$30
Voodoo3 2000 ~50
-total: ~$200 (without shipping)

Intel:
pre-packaged MB (i815 chipset and 600mhz celeron) ~$140
64MB generic pc100 ~$25
Voodoo3 2000 ~$50 (i815 has integrated video, so the V3 isn't needed, but it'll give you better performance)
-total: ~$215

Note: I'm not sure if you'll need a new tower or power supply, but your going to be much better off saving some money, starting from scratch and getting a whole new system when you can afford it.

 

[madthumbs]

Sell the Packard Bell, as they are crap, and not upgradeable. Then you will have more money to work with. What KnightBreed suggests is good, I would go with a Duron, but put more money into a good motherboard/ Power supply. V3 2k good choice if still available for under $50.

 

[$pade]

that packard bell can still be sold? Some how i think shipping will be more than what i can sell it for

Will 64 megs be enough to run windows me?

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

64megs will be enough to get it to run, but avoid too much multitalking.

 

[hans007]

guys he's gonna need a new case , etc also. Here is my suggestion if all he wants to do is run diablo 2, diablo 2 pretty much needs 96megs of ram to run decently especially online.

kt133 $80
duron 600 $40
heatsink $5 , or maybe reuse the old one, but i doubt that will work
generic case $25 (power supply should work , i've run a .25 micron k7-700 on a 230watt generic fine)
reuse the s3 virge for now (he said 2d only right, he probably has a pretty small monitor to go with that stuff)
128mb generic pc1133 $60 (pc100 is $5 less)
most kt133 boards have integrated sound

I would try the forsale/trade forum for this, its gonna be hard to get the duron for that cheap. Use the hot deals forum if you can as well

 

[Dark4ng3l]

go with the low end amd system(it's alot faster than any celeron)

 

[hans007]

for the pre packaged intel system, you could go with a very good via 133a such as a msi-6309 or cuvx and save yourself $50-60 , spend $40 of that to bump up to 128mb and it'd be faster than the amd system most likely

 

[vvvvvv]

amd is cheap... good stuff