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PC Upgrade - still possible to reuse old components?

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Lashiec:
Have in mind that both mainboards would not hold too well future upgrades, as they only have 2 SATA ports. Other thing that worries me is those ATX connectors, you'll have to do some cable management to avoid PSU cables getting in the way with the CPU heatsink. Hmmm, tricky. The ASRock is worse in that regard, but feature-wise seems better. VIA chipsets used to be OK back in the Pentium III times, now the poor guys got a little behind, but so did SiS, also a decent manufacturer. RAM, even if you put 4 GB, you won't use it (unless you plan to run Photoshop & Crysis side by side :))

EDIT: Of course I saw something wrong with the ECS, it uses the MicroATX form factor, that explains the two RAM sockets, although, funny enough, it says that supports 16 GB. Hmmm, finding two 8 GB DIMMs will be difficult and EXPENSIVE ;D. Besides, the ECS uses AC'97 for sound, while the ASRock uses HDA and the top-of-the-line Realtek chip as well.

lanux128:
thanks for the links.. with the memory issue is out of the way, the ASRock mainboard looks the better prospect.. now going to hunt if there is stock available.. :)

lanux128:
thanks for the pointers, Lashiec.. i don't quite understand what you mean by cable management.. i hope you can elaborate a bit. this pc will be mainly for word processing & casual surfing and other than that, i'm planning to install some educational software for my kindergarten-going son.. :)

Carol Haynes:
Have in mind that both mainboards would not hold too well future upgrades, as they only have 2 SATA ports. Other thing that worries me is those ATX connectors, you'll have to do some cable management to avoid PSU cables getting in the way with the CPU heatsink. Hmmm, tricky. The ASRock is worse in that regard-Lashiec (August 29, 2007, 07:17 AM)
--- End quote ---

I agree - it is really badly placed - what were they thinking? Lanux the issue is that you want to keep cable bunches out of the main air fow path to allow for the best cooling. On the AS-Rock board they have place the main ATX power connector between the CPU and the main venting point on a standard ATX case  - so any fan sucking air out will have to suck through the main power cables. You will need to think how best to route the cables to avoid disrupting the airflow too much.

With massive SATA drives growing in size all the time is only 2 sockets really a big issue (ok it is nice to have more if you want to build big RAID arrays, and eSATA would be a nice feature) - you can easily have ~1 Tb of storage with just the SATA sockets, but you can also have 2 PATA drives two as well as IDE optical drives.

f0dder:
I wouldn't go for any other chipset than intel for intel CPUs, nvidia nforce for AMD CPUs. Things might have improved in the last a-bit-more-than-few years, but I've been burnt by both SiS and VIA chipsets.

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