Old motherboard

[Waiko]

Hi guys,

Want to get some suggestion about an old motherboard.

Brand : Asrock
Chipset: SIS730S
Man SKU: MB-M810LMR
Athlon 1400

Im not looking into gaming but just office use. What can I do to optimized it. Likewise what memory, video card, sound card, etc.
Please Advise .
Thank you for your time.

 

[numark]

Looks like that board has onboard video and sound. If you're just using for pure office applications with no games, I don't see any reason to buy another video and sound card. As for memory, well, you're stuck with PC133 on that one. Just get probably 512MB (2 x 256MB) sticks. Don't buy the cheap stuff, the high-density crap, since I don't think that chipset supports high-density. Even if it does, it's not worth the instability issues. Other than that, just put standard components into there. There's really not much that can be done tweaking-wise with a board like that, so just put in things that will work well for you.

 

[Waiko]

How about the proccessor? I have athlon 1400, do I keep it go for better choice? What else can I go further with this mobo?

 

[numark]

You can go as high as an Athlon XP 2600+, although IMHO running PC133 SDRAM with an Athlon XP wouldn't be a good experience. For normal office use, an Athlon 1.4Ghz should do quite fine coupled with 512MB RAM. Any upgrade you could do to the chip wouldn't have a good price-to-performance-increase ratio to make it worth the effort. The only thing is that the board you have only has USB 1.1, so if you have any USB 2.0 devices, it might be a good idea to invest in a USB 2.0 PCI card, otherwise you're going to get horrible transfers rates (I have that problem on my old laptop). Maybe another network card to limit the CPU utilization issues inherent in the onboard NIC. You can find cheap 3COM 3C905 cards on the net pretty easily that will work well.