'Puter part recomendations please.

[StrangeRanger]

I've got a bud who is currently running a PII 400 who wants to heat things up a bit. He asked me for advice, but I'm not really good at it. I'm always thinking bleeding edge stuff, and he wants more kinda "budget" stuff.
So, I need some suggestions if you can give me any for a system that will be used for light surfing, some gaming and some small "office" type (excell) work. He's going to keep most of his periph. items like vid card, sound card, monitor etc. Basically just wants to step up his mainboard, cpu, memory and HD. He also does not like AMD. Don't ask, but it will be a hard days work in getting him to buy AMD if I can't come up with a workable Intel cpu solution.
He does not upgrade often and does not want to think about that. So, I was thinking something along the lines of a PIII and a 133 mhz bus board. Sound about right to you? Got any ideas? Thanks,
j

 

[epod]

I'd smack him in the head till he gives in and goes for an AMD =P

KT266A Shuttle motherboard is only $80!... and get a normal Athlon T-Bird 1.4 for $95... I mean for $175... I don't care what P3 you throw at it, it's not going to compete.

Now if you take a look at say
Asus TUVX for $85 and a PIII that's and a 1 Ghz P3 for $130.. that's $215.. and if you want to try to compare a 1 Ghz p3 with a 1.4 Ghz Athlon.. good luck. That 1.4 Ghz athlon is performing like a 1.7 Ghz P4...

But anyhow.. those are your two solutions right there..

 

[Mavrick007]

If he wants a cheap Intel, tell him to get the fastest Celeron he can afford and about 256megs of ram. Get a new 20-40Gig Maxtor drive and he's off to the races. Not the best system out there, but it will be loads faster than his pII 400 and he'll be able to run any office app and most games(assuming he has a decent enough vid card now).

1Ghz Celeron $56
mobo $75-85 bucks for a fairly decent board
ram $25 for a stick of 256megs
Maxtor drive(20-40gig) $60-90 depending on money to spend
~$225 bucks for a decent "cheap" upgrade

 

[GreenGecko]

Well, I'm an AMD person myself, but if I were into premium Intel Products.....

I might suggest looking at:

Intel PIII 800 133MHz CPU or Intel Celeron 800+ CPU
Thermaltake Volcano 5 HSF
Shuttle AV18 MOBO (takes PC133 RAM)
Western Digital 60GB HD

He's still looking at 400 - 500 for the upgrade, but you can also look a bestbuy.com. They have 1GHz Celeron E-Machines for under 575 with a $75 mail-in rebate.

Hope that gives you some ideas.

 

[Daovonnaex]

A PIII Tualatin wouldn't be bad, but vastly inferior to AMD. I'm not expert on socket-370 planars, so all I can do is advise you on the CPU. As for HDD, I'd recommend the 60gb Seagate Barracuda IV--not because it has the best performance (it has good performance, just not as good as the Deskstar 60GXP), but because it's rather quiet and ideal for the non-power user. As for memory, don't waste money on DDR or RDRAM for a PIII (it has a maximum memory bandwidth of only 1.06GB/s), get a planar based on the Intel 815e chipset and somewhere between 256-512mb of PC133 Crucial SDRAM. By the way, he really should upgrade his graphics card. Basically though, he should get AMD if you can convince him. If not, the PIII Tualatin is his best bet.

 

[iamtrout]

Whatever you do, DO NOT GET AN EMACHINE!!!
ALL name brand computers that are priced that low (Dell, Compaq, IBM, Emachines, etc.) have most of their parts integrated into the motherboard. They also most likely use the Micro ATX form factor, which severly limits your upgradability. I've seen Emachines with NO AGP slot and only 2 PCI slots. Some also have outdated ISA slots and their reliability and tech support is spotty at best.
Hope this helps.