need upgrade/replacement advice (or advice on repair)

AntaresVI

Platinum Member
May 10, 2001
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For the past few months, I have been running a Duron 800 on an OEM Gateway mobo with 128 megs of pc100. I also ran a Radeon LE, and a generic sound card. I'm pretty low budget, being a high schooler without a job, but I like to have as much performance as i can for the money. This system worked pretty well, and did what i wanted it to.

Until today.

I had my case open for better cooling while overclocking the radeon, and i had stupidely put a padlock on top of it. I bumped the case, and the lock went crashing down into it. The lock bounced off the Radeon and landed on the soundcard.

After disassembling the computer and reassembling, formatting the hard drive, and reinstalling Windows ME, the sound card worked erratically, sometimes working, sometimes not. the Padeon worked fine in a regular desktop setting, but ran 3dmark2001 at 8 fps where it used to run around 85. In the 3dmark game demo, it hits 85 for about 10 seconds, then crashes, dead, needing a cold reboot. THe computer also will not install Elite Force or Half-Life, reasons unknown.

SO anyway, I looked at my options. I could replace the vid and sound for ~120. Unfortunately, I dont have that kind of cash. I dont know if this can be fixed, so i crossed that option off. My other option i thought of was nForce. I could get one mobo for 130 and have all my problems solved!

I am willign to wait that long, but is this feasible? Would I be better off replacing what I had?

Thanks for any advice.

Matt

(Also posting in general hardware)