looking for some upgrade advice

[tsunek]

My system has been feeling a little slugish as of late. I mainly play games with my system. I currently have a celeron 566@850 on an abit bm6 with 256 MB ram and an ati radeon. I have somewhat of a limited budget and was just wondering what people would recommend and the type of performance improvement i would see.

 

[Athlon4all]

What power supply do you have? I'd pick up a ECS K7S6A ($70)or Shuttle AK31A ($80), a Morgan Duron 1Ghz for $55 OEM, and 256Megs of PC2100 DDR ($70). Cheaper? Well, you could take ECS K7S5A so you can use your current SDRAM but, I wouldn't recommend going it because lots of issues have been had with it.

 

[bakchoy]

How limited is your budget? Once of your biggest limitations is probably the 128K cache on the Celeron. Another would be the 100mhz FSB (with the overclocking). You could go to an AMD Thunderbird for pretty cheap--be sure to go with the 266FSB instead of the 200FSB because both are available. If you're an Intel fan, it will probably take pretty big bucks (i.e. P4) to get a significant and noticable change.

 

[splice]

Both K7S5A boards I have are running great. One runs a Duron 1GHz w/ 512MB RAM on a 250W AOpen PS. The other runs a duron 850 w/256MB RAM on a 235W PowerMan PS. Both have been running as file servers and THINK clients for 2 weeks now w/o a hitch. I would have to say... on a limited budget, go for a K7S5A, a Duron/Athlon 1GHz, and PC133 RAM

 

[starwarsdad]

What is your budget? That is going to be the determining factor.

 

[Mustanggt]

I would get a KT266A board Epox 8KHA+ and a cheap duron some DDR ram and your system will be alot faster.

 

[tsunek]

max budget for an upgrade would be in the 250 range. I have a 300 watt enlight amd approved power supply. Thanks to all so far

 

[tsunek]

I have an additional 150 set aside for a hd upgrade. I was looking at the ibm 60gxps. any thoughts on that

 

[Athlon4all]

Forget IBM. Their recent track record in reliability is questionable, get a Maxtor or Western Digital.

 

[happie23]

I asked the HD question to the community and they have responded in favour of Seagate 'cuda IV. The main advantage this has is that it is one of the quietest drive out there.

You could also get the Diamond Max special edition with the 8MB buffer, but that would cost a pretty penny.

 

[tsunek]

it seems i would be able to upgrade to a sis735 board ofr a via kt266a mobo with this and one of the lower end athlon xp processors. Do you think i would see i sizeable performance increase with this upgrade?

 

[Gog]

Tsunek, I agree, going for a kt266a board and a 1700+ Athlon XP is probably the best choice for you (will total about $200). However you will have to shell out an additional $70 for DDR Ram.

If you go for the ECS K7S5A or ECS K7S6A and pair it up with a 1ghz Duron, the increase in performance won't be that great, considering u have your celery running at over 800mhz.

If I was in your shoes I might consider holding out a couple of months and wait for the price of DDR ram to settle down... which is likely to happen according to this article.

Good luck with whatever you choose to do.

 

[starwarsdad]

On that budget, I would say go with the K7S5A, a 1.4 T-bird and 256MB of DDR. That will give you quite a bit of bang for the buck. I use the 60 GXP's exclusively now for IDE drives.Very fast and reliable drives. I have had good experiences with Maxtor and Fujitsu drives, as well. I have never owned a Western Digital that survived the warranty period, though. That is just my experience.

Best of luck!

 

[tsunek]

I've been looking and i've seen a lot of complaints about WD drives and the 60gxps. I think i'm going to go with seagate baracuda IV