Re: Is there a guide to upgrading options?
- From: George Macdonald <fammacd=!SPAM^nothanks@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 04:29:12 -0400
On Mon, 11 Jul 2005 21:19:17 -0500, Peabody <waybackKILLSPAM44@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
>My Win98SE, Celeron 500, system can no longer keep up, so I would
>like to upgrade. Is there a website that discusses what's available
>now, and what might be worth doing or not?
Obviously when it comes to upgrades, there's no "one size" so it's
difficult to get a "recipe". You might try
http://www.extremetech.com/category2/0,1695,644478,00.asp and see if they
have something which fits... and look at the rest of their site for further
info. There are many sites which cover components of course, like
www.anandtech.com and www.xbitlabs.com.
>I would like to just upgrade my existing system because I have a 19"
>CRT monitor that I like a lot, and two fairly new 7200 rpm 80 GB
>drives that work fine. So I was thinking I would need a mobo,
>processor, RAM, pwower supply, and of course the infamous Windows
>XP home. Somehow, though, my guess is that I could get a complete
>new system for less than the cost of an upgrade.
If your case is >2 years or so old, you'll need a new case and maybe new
interconnect cables for the hard disks - the round cables are easier for
routing. The trouble with ready-made systems is that they tend to be
scaled across the board according to the CPU speed: faster CPUs come with
big hard drives, expensive video & sound cards. Sure there is often a
customization option but scaling down the odd component doesn't seem to
save as much as it should.
Some vendors will sell you a "barebones" system, with case, mbrd, CPU,
memory etc. but often with a restricted choice of alternative components.
www.monarchcomputer.com does this but I've no experience with them and I've
heard good and bad. Might be a useful exercise to see what you can
configure anyway.
>Anyway, it's been so long since I looked at any of this stuff
>(what's a Sempron? PCI Express? serial ATA?) that I was hoping there
>would be a very helpful site would explain it all and get me
>up-to-date.
Sempron is AMD's "economy" (Celeron-like) version of their Athlon64 which
currently fits in a socket 754 mbrd, has 128KB of L2 cache and doesn't have
64-bit capability... though that last is going to change soon. If you go
AMD, I'd recommend socket 939 for the mbrd and a lower speed-grade Athlon64
over Sempron.
PCI Express is a new interconnect standard which will eventually displace
PCI. It can be configured with a variety of "lane" widths and the x16 is
used for new video cards; most new mbrds come with a x16 slot for video and
maybe a x1 and x4 slot plus 3 or 4 PCI slots. Though the PCI Express x16
has currently about double the bandwidth of AGP 8x for video, the
difference is not that noticable for current video reqts. Note that though
AGP 8x video cards are still available with latest GPUs, they are often
more expensive than the equivalent PCI-e x16 version - PCI Express is the
way forward here.
SATA is a new serial interconnect to replace EIDE/ATA with much higher
clock speeds, lower pin count and narrower cables - hard disks and some DVD
writers now come with it though there are loads of EIDE/ATA versions still
available. Again current performance difference is not going to astound
you so you can get by with your EIDE/ATA drives, sometimes called PATA now,
without much perfromance penalty.
--
Rgds, George Macdonald
.
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