wife-said-no Posted December 12, 2000 Share Posted December 12, 2000 I am about to rip apart the P.O.S. Compac 500mgHz celeron computer to upgrade to a 1.1 GHz Thunderbird AMD. The problem that I am running into is that the motherboards on pricewatch have bad websites. All of the websites show their motherboards as 1Ghz compatable. No one mentions 1.1GHz. Any recommendations. This will mainly be for gaming and the Internet. A little School/Hospital work on the side. Here is what I plan 1.1 GHz AMD thunderbird CPu ??? motherboard Nvida geForce2 ultra annihilator. CSlabs x-gamer 5.1 sound card. 256MB RAM I am going to use the current HD, DVD player and ZIP drive from my current computer. Eventually get a 7200RPM HD. Thanks for the help. ------------------ Come on honey why can't I spend some more money? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Hofy Posted December 12, 2000 Share Posted December 12, 2000 The Abit KT7 and KT7/RAID will handle up to a 1.2Ghz. (12x multiplier)c> ------------------ SO MUCH TO DO, SO LITTLE TIME.c> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paragon Posted December 13, 2000 Share Posted December 13, 2000 1. Wait for DDR RAM support to come out (I'm gonna get one when they come out in the coming weeks) - Are you looking on the supplier website or the actual motherboard website? 2. Don't bother wasting money on GeForce2 Ultra unless really play games at 1600X or greater all the time (I got a GeForce2 GTS and I love it - altho I am still on my old PII300 computer) 3. I would suggest gettin the 7200RPM ATA100 drive (I think the DDR Motherboards are gonna support it) and use it as your main drive. Use your old drive as a backup (Dual HDs have come in handy for me when I have to format my C: drive - just backup everything to the second drive - I also keep the program files I download and install for ease of installing my system again) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XPhys71 Posted December 13, 2000 Share Posted December 13, 2000 I agree with Paragon on the vid card. I just got a Visiontek Geforce2 GTS DDR 32 MB and am overclocking it to 235 core/375 memory with no stability problems. Definitely a better deal than the ultra for the price. Paragon--so when you back up your HD with the old one, do you just slave the old one and transfer files via drag and drop? Using it as a backup is such a good idea--I wish I did that before my HD crashed last week. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paragon Posted December 13, 2000 Share Posted December 13, 2000 Without RAMsinks I cant get to 375.. havn't really tested much since there is really no use on this system (PII300 64MB RAM - LX motherboard 2XAGP) I'll wait till I tweak the card - LasagnaII HS&Fan and Ramsinks with fans As for my HDs.. I don't really backup teh whole drive.. I just backup documents and programs and also keep my personal stuff on it. If I needed to reinstall Windoze.. I would rather just do a total reinstall - better off this way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wife-said-no Posted December 13, 2000 Author Share Posted December 13, 2000 What vid card would you guys suggest, the main thing about the Ultra Ann. is that it is a 64mb card. I looked at the Voodoo but they are on track for bankrupcy, not to mention only a 32mb card. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dman155 Posted December 13, 2000 Share Posted December 13, 2000 Go with a GF2 Pro. They have 64 MB of DDR for bandwidth, and they cost about 300$. Read some reviews at gamers depot or anand or somewhere, the performance difference between the pro and the ultra is slim. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wife-said-no Posted December 13, 2000 Author Share Posted December 13, 2000 Paragon You mention the DDR RAM but there is nothing that I can find on anandtech.com about it. I was looking for some reviews on how much better it will be. Right now gigabyte only has one motherboard with DDR cabability in the 700MHz range. How long will it be before they move into the 1.1-1.2GHz range? Thanks for the help. I just don't want to wait 6 months for something that isn't going to be a seable improvement ------------------ Come on honey why can't I spend some more money? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KBlair Posted December 13, 2000 Share Posted December 13, 2000 Preliminary tests that I have seen show about a 10% performance increase with DDR RAM. I just got an ABIT KT7-RAID with 800Mhz Tbird myself, along with an ATI Radeon 64MB, Ultra Wide SCSI controller card, 2 9GB Seagate Barracuda harddrives, 2 Maxtor 30.7GB 7200ROM ATA100 hard drives, a Plextor 40x SCSI CDROM drive, SBLive 5.1 Platinum,Yamaha 4x4x16 CDRW (inherited), 256MB CAS2 PC133 RAM, and a Sony GDM-FD900 24" minotor. I think that will do me for a while so I'm not that interested in DDR RAM at this point. 10% is a good bit of increase, but with a 1.1Ghz machine will you really notice? Will you notice the difference between 47 FPS and 50FPS? I can't, that's why I got the ATI card, for the image quality and it's $200 less than the Ultra.c> ------------------ Who knows what evil lurks in the darkness of The Kave ? www.thekave.net Home of The Klipschmonster! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paragon Posted December 13, 2000 Share Posted December 13, 2000 Here is one of the previews I looked at from October so there may have been changes http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/00q4/001030/index.html Here are the benchmarks: http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/00q4/001030/athlon-13.html Gaming Benchmarks: http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/00q4/001030/athlon-16.html I'll see if I can find any more. As a side note.. when you get your AMD processor.. ya might want to spend a little extra on a shim so you are less likely to break the damn thing - A lot of HeatSinks go on tight and if you tip the HS.. bad bad bad Here is a link to One that I was made aware of froma friend (I will probably just buy one since it is easier than making one) http://www.nerdsbyte.com/mall/accessories.asp (near the bottom of the page) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
XPhys71 Posted December 14, 2000 Share Posted December 14, 2000 Yeah, go with the Pro, if you want really good performance but don't want to spend $400+ on an ultra. I may have to back dwon the memory speed on my card, at least until I get some RAM sinks myself. I was playing cstrike last night and I was getting some artifacts during play towards the end of my session. Does anyone know of a mobo-only site? I'm still trying to figure out the best mobo for my new baby (P3 733 slot1). Anyone heard of a DDR mobo chipset for slot 1's? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Markm91 Posted December 16, 2000 Share Posted December 16, 2000 Ok here's where I bring thy hellfire down upon my head. I have an Athlon (noth Thunderbird unfortunately) and love it. However the older K7 mobos had probs with Geforce 2 cards because they where a major voltage hog. I just recently got a Radeon because I like my graphics 32 bit and full screen. If you plan on a DDR graphics card and a Athlon mobo update your bios. My board was fussy about the Radeon, I updated the bios and is took it. Don't get a Vodoo card you'll get much better longevity from a Gforce and even more from the Radeons. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KBlair Posted December 16, 2000 Share Posted December 16, 2000 Mark, Which Radeon did you get? I just got the 64MB DDR and I absolutely love it. I upgraded from an ATI Xpert2000 32MB card. I bought ATI because I'm a quality freak on DVDs, and gaming is secondary to DVDs on my systems. I was surprised that I could actually see a difference in display quality on the Radeon. I didn't think it could get much better than what I had. Of course, It could be my monitor c> ------------------ Who knows what evil lurks in the darkness of The Kave ? www.thekave.net Home of The Klipschmonster! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Markm91 Posted December 17, 2000 Share Posted December 17, 2000 I got the 32 meg DDR version. I couldn't afford the 64 but I don't think I took to much of a performance hit. I had a Creative OEM TNT 2. If anyone out there gets a Radeon and you wanna really see what it can do install the ATI demo called "Radeons Ark" it shows everything the card can do and make you say Geforce?? Whats a Geforce?? The DVD aspect wasn't a big deal to me because I have a real dvd player in my living room. But after seeing what the Radeon can do I wonder why anyone would get something not geared for the future of graphics. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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