why upgrade? 1600 athlon XP here....

[jasonjm]

kinda strange, I'm a gadget geek, and I find myself struggling for a reason to upgrade the actual "guts" of my computer....

Right now I have an athlon XP 1600, with decent 1 GIG of RAM, and a decent MSI motherboard with USB 2, and an ATI radeon 9000.

The rest of my system consists of 2 x 19inch dell flatpanels, 3 x western digital 200 gig 8 meg IDE drives, and a dvd burner, and dvd reader, and a bose soundsystem, so you can see that I have not been cheap on the rest of the system.

I work on computers all day, and it just seems to me that for every day use, and playing the few games that I play here and there which are mostly strategy type games, that the difference between what I have and pentium 2.4 machines that i work on from DELL doesnt seem at all noticable (in fact my system feels faster, maybe its the better hard drives, better ram and more ram)

Now, correct me if I am wrong, but lets say i bought a brand new 865 Asus motherboard, the fastest XMS DDR ram, a 2.4C and o'clocked it to over 3 ghz, and put in a western digital raptor 10000 rpm drive, would I notice some major performance ZIPPYNESS and increase? or am I just throwing away more money, and should I rather just wait to see what is out early next year? (and spend the money now on chipping my car instead, hehe, get more HP out that thing)

It seems like the current "guts" of the computers aren't outdating so quickly anymore, which is bad for the PC retailers.

Any thoughts?

 

[Corporate Thug]

i think you'll see a very big increase with a 2.4C@3Ghz over the 1600+ esp since the FSB will be up around a 1000mhz or so. however, your video card will then be the bottleneck so you may wanna look into an upgrade on that as well

 

[rhawk79]

i noticed in increase just going from 2.4 to 3.0 so yes you will most definetly feel it.

 

[mechBgon]

Incidentally, if you don't already, you might want to give Windows equal-sized pagefiles on all of your hard drives. If you're building a new system, you could consider the Raptor or even a 15000rpm SCSI drive, but remember... these are lower-capacity hard drives, the WD360GD is 36Gb and SCSI starts at 18Gb.

 

[beatle]

For everyday tasks, you probably won't notice much of a difference. I went from a tbird o/c'ed to 1266 and 768 megs of PC133 to a tbred b running @ 2200Mhz and 1024 megs of PC3200. For day to day tasks like web browsing and irc, things were mostly the same. I did notice a huge difference in games and media encoding, however.