Revamping an old comp need suggestions

[HybridSquirrel]

I have an old athlon xp 2800+ sitting around at home it had a bad board so i just bought a p4 than now my opty rig. i was thinking of revamping if with the following products...let me know what you think..

Board
Video

I need the sata ports on the board and thats the only board i can find that has then. i will also be running 1 gb of supertalent ram(cheep brand i know but its stable) it will be 2 x 512 i already have them in that system. I will need a power supply but im gonna get a cheep forton 400w and i also have 2 400gb hitachi sata drives so im pretty much set let me know what you think of those to revamp it

 

[snoturtle]

What are you going to use it for?
Another gaming machine?

 

[StrangerGuy]

That CPU is going to a big bottleneck if you want to game on it.

 

[Madwand1]

Nforce2, gigabit, 6 SATA I.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813123221#DetailSpecs

 

[HybridSquirrel]

not for gaming and if i will be gaming it will be mild gaming only when people come over and need a computer to game on. hence the mid range graphics. i was gonna use it for office productivity spreadsheets stuff like that

EDIT: i also am not 100% sure if the processor is still alive or not do you think if i took it to comp usa they could test it? i dont want to spend money on a board just to return it later

 

[fire400]

looks good to me.

 

[HybridSquirrel]

what do you guys mean by the processor throtlling? i played cs:source on it back in the day on an old fx5600 and it worked just fine

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Originally posted by: HybridSquirrel
I have an old athlon xp 2800+ sitting around at home it had a bad board so i just bought a p4 than now my opty rig. i was thinking of revamping if with the following products...let me know what you think..

Board

Not nearly as good as one of these two:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813123234

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813123221

The $56 one has two SATA-I ports. The other, $78 one has SIX Sata-I ports!

Video

There are numerous Geforce 6600GT's for that price that will perform quite a bit better, as will a lot of X800GTO's.

I need the sata ports on the board and thats the only board i can find that has then. i will also be running 1 gb of supertalent ram(cheep brand i know but its stable) it will be 2 x 512 i already have them in that system. I will need a power supply but im gonna get a cheep forton 400w and i also have 2 400gb hitachi sata drives so im pretty much set let me know what you think of those to revamp it

There were plenty of SATA equipped MB's in Price Grabber's Socket A set of hits, but Newegg has scaled way back on how much stock they offer for sale, and you'd have to go into their Refurbished stuff to really find a variety of MB's for an XP. I'm not a fan of Hitchi drives, personally, although I have had one of the DeskStars for 2-3 years (since just before IBM sold to Hitachi) that never did become a "DeathStar" after all . .


:thumbsup:

 

[HybridSquirrel]

thanks for all your help

 

[imported_Kiwi]

Originally posted by: HybridSquirrel
... played cs:source on it back in the day on an old fx5600 and it worked just fine

People forget too fast how capable some slightly older hardware is, although I would've considered an FX 5600 awfully limited compared to the 6600GT (or the 9800XT I ened up with when I couldn't afford a 6600GT) that I suggested above, in place of an X1600. I have an XP 3000 that can run most aything, if I cared to do so -- but I almost never waste time on any fast action stuff other than an occasional simulation.

The local cable company has no real competition for broadband, and prices subscriptions too high. I probably wouldn't spend money to play an "MMOO-whatever", if I did have broad band; though I might look at Guild Wars just to see what all the hoo- hah is about. So if an XP was in any way bottle necked by WoW, I'm unlikely to find out.

 

[Madwand1]

Although it's true that marginal improvements (even ones such as 20% improvement from Conroe or a 20% improvement from SLI, etc., ) tend to get blown out of proportion as being everything, you should also be aware that there are potentially significant differences when you compare an Athlon XP's performance with a more modern processor's.

I found for myself that I couldn't get a significant WoW performance improvement despite changing to a much faster video card using my Athlon XP 2600+; I had to change both the video and CPU to an Athlon 64 to get a significant performance improvement. The following thread has some more info, and RussianSensation's post has some useful links. (On WoW performance specifically, I'd mention AT's own WoW article -- it's probably better overall than the one linked here.)

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=27&threadid=1820042&enterthread=y

Intel will probably have a lot more to say about the problems of just comparing CPU clock speeds among different processor families when they market Conroe. I hear they're going to introduce an "efficiencies per instruction" measure that could be enlightening. Unfortunately, I'd also expect that metric to be crippled and useful only among Intel processors to make Intel processors look good, but that's just learned cynicism.

Edit: For clarity: I went from the Athlon XP to a X2 3800+. Both the XP and X2 have base clock rate around 2 GHz, but the X2 performed a lot better, even with just a single core enabled.

 

[imported_Kiwi]

The A64/ 3000 I have, and MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum MB, are "in reserve". I had planned to build a replacement PC in May or June of 2006 for one of the three XP systems, but with the price fluctuations rising from AMD stopping the production of the 3000, and just about all MB makers other than the budget names having dropped their AGP slot designs, I bought the two parts to make sure I wasn't gouged this coming spring or summer.

Meanwhile, other than flight simulation games, my slowest XP (a 2100 with a GF3 Ti-500) keeps up fine with everything else I use a computer for. The impending release of ES IV: Oblivion did encourage me to get a lot more current (9800XT) in VGA power, and to wish that MS would hurry up and answer about the CD for XP's SP2.

Here's an edit I've added to my comment in my prior reply, about the noise and expense up there at the bleeding edge:

The local cable company has no real competition for broadband, and prices their Inet subscriptions too high. I probably wouldn't spend money to play an "MMOO-whatever", if I did have broad band, though I might look at Guild Wars just to see what all the hoo- hah is about. Thus, if an XP was in any way bottle necked by WoW, I'm unlikely to find out.

 

[markkleb]

I have a MSI K7N2 Delta 2 that also has what you want

 

[HybridSquirrel]

i might even step it up to a socket 754 chip and move on from there