Upgrade question

[carlsburg]

So i've had this micron millennia tower now for 4 years and its slowly grinding to a halt. It currently a p3 600mhz, with a radeon 7200. I have wanted to upgrade the motherboard and processor for a while but am unsure of how to proceed. I am leaning towards an AMD system as they are cheaper, but is the difference in cost worth it considering i'd have to beef up my cooling system. If anyone has any advice on how I should proceed please chime in. Ideally this computer would be used mostly just for gaming, but I don't need to have the biggest and best. Just as long as it runs the game at an acceptable level is fine. Thanks ahead of time

Carlsburg

 

[Erasmus-X]

I'm guessing that your Micron is built around one of the old plastic Palo Alto enclosures (Dell also used these around the same time). If memory serves me correctly, a standard ATX power supply will not fit in that case without keeping the left panel off (you're gonna want a new PSU when you upgrade the motherboard; the one they use is not adequate for Athlon CPU's).

For that reason I would suggest looking into a new case as well. You can spend about $60 or so and get a decent Antec minitower (power supply included). BTW, what's your budget? You also have to consider that a new AMD-based rig is gonna need new RAM as well. And if you're big into gaming, you'll definitely want to scrap that Radeon 7200 and get a better card (this will have the greatest impact on gaming performance). If your budget is tight, I'd grab a Ti4200, a cheap and reasonably powerful card.