OKAY The Old Fart is upgrading to AMD - need recommendations for mobo.

[grumpy 1]

Think further about your motherboard purchase and ram b4 spending any money with amd barton just around the corner it may be nice to have a board thaat officially supports 166 mhz bus speeds if amd decide to up there bus speeds further so you would need pc 2700 ram as well

Cheers

[FlyingPenguin]

Whether it's officially supported or not, it'd still be overclocked wouldn't it?

There's NEVER a good time to buy - something bigger and better is always around the corner.

I've been perfectly happy with this P3-1000 for 2 years and could live with it for another 6 months. All my games run fine. Sure, it'd be NICE to run Q3 Urban Terror and SOF2 at 1280x768, but they look and play fine at 1024x768 so no big deal.

It would also be nice to have a little more horsepower when using Photoshop, but my system hardly feels slow now.

This is strictly the "itch to upgrade", and anything I buy now will hold be for another 2 years probably (unless we all start using quantum computers next year - NOT LIKELY).

I have a rule that I never upgrade until I can DOUBLE my performance and, effectively, I will nearly have that going from a P3-1000 to an XP2000+ (yeah I know it's not a 2Ghz CPU, but effective performance and difference in architecture gets it close - besides that kind of performance is hard to measure anymore).

Since I have enough parts lying around to build a system around the old mobo, CPU and ram I can re-coup the money I'm spending on the upgrade by selling the old gear as a complete system, and I have lots of clients itching to upgrade for cheap, so this is a no-brainer.

It's time. I never regret an upgrade- there's ALWAYS something better next month, and next month. and next month - who cares.


I also have reservations about new chipsets. I prefer buying tried and tested hardware - this is going in a mission critical system, and I can't afford downtime or hassles. As it is I'm setting up my Athlon 900 LAN party system as a backup system for the week or so it'll take me to setup the new rig and satisfy myself it's stable.

Since I intend to do a new install I'm also debating going to WinXP. I have mixed feelings about it, but I truly feel MS will force us all to upgrade by the middle of next year anyway so best to get it over with.

I've spent the last 2 months tweaking the LAN party rig to run the way I like it with WinXP installed (basically it's had practically every XP GUI feature disabled so it looks, feels, and smells like Win2K).

[grumpy 1]

What made you decide against p4 upgrade option?????

[dadx2mj]

Damn FP, AMD and WinXP you have completed your transformation to the Dark Side. FEEL THE POWER!

[PreDatoR]

Couldn't agree more with you Dad. and to get double performance out of a P4 you'd need a 2.4 gig chip.. Their too expensive and a total waste os silicon if you ask me.

[FlyingPenguin]

What Pred said - the numbers just don't add up.

I'd gladly stay with Intel but the XP 2000 is hands down right now a LOT of bang for the buck, and an equivalent P4 would cost more than I want to spend.

Things have changed. AMD CPUs are better supported by Windows and applications - comparably to Intel. The time has come where both are an equally viable option in MY eyes and the deciding factor is going to be cost. Intel doesn't price their CPUs for the the do-it-yourselfer and AMD does.

I grudgingly bid farewell to Intel. It's been a grand time - maybe next time around

[two slow]

There's NEVER a good time to buy - something bigger and better is always around the corner.

That is what I say too.
I'm getting an Iwill XP333 htis week or the begining of next week. If you don't have one before then i'll let you know what there like from a n00b's eyes.

[PreDatoR]

I just traded my 8K3A+ for a XP333R and some cash. I should have just kept the XP333 i have in my comp but no i wanted to try out the Via shit... and well i'm headed back to Ali.

[FlyingPenguin]

From all the reviews I'm pretty much totally sold on the XP333. Just waiting on a check that's coming in.

Debating spending the extra money on the RAID version - it's not much, but it'd be nice to have although I decided I'm not going RAID on the new system - at least not for now.

I was going to keep my old Raid array and use the IWill RAID card it's connected to right now so I didn't have to reformat it, but it's only a ATA66 RAID card and one drive is a 66 while the other is a 100 (bot h 30 gig).

I was at Circuit City yesterday to buy car speakers and saw a WDC 60Gb ATA100 7200 RPM for $89 on sale (LAST ONE!) and picked it up.

I went ahead and already copied the RAID array to the new drive and installed it (I also resized some partitions while I was at it).

Works out better - RAID performance on an ATA66 array using 2 year old drives isn't much better than the performance I'm getting out of a single modern ATA100 drive (frankly, I don't feel ANY difference and I'm running it on an ATA66 controller right now).

If I want to go RAID again later, I'll pickup another 60Gb drive.

I was getting worried about a disk crash on the array (sooner or later) now that this system is so mission critical. Only reason I got RAID in the first place was for video work, and it turns out I've done damn little of that anyway.

Plus the new drive is MUCH quieter than the old array (the old Maxtor 30Gb in particular had a faint but VERY annoying high frequency whine).

Now I have an Maxtor 30Gb ATA66 I can install on in my LAN system to replace the 20Gb in there which is a bit too small. I'm going to leave the old 30Gb WDC ATA 100 in the workstation for video work, but I'm leaving the power cable unplugged for now to keep noise down (maybe I'll wire a power switch for it - I rarely do video work).