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Yay, Upgrade time! - Inspire me with hardware I can buy =-D

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JavaJones:
This is so confusing. I think you're making it harder than it needs to be by trying to stick with older hardware that you have. If you need a new graphics card and can only get that by having a new motherboard, then you'll need a new CPU regardless, and good luck finding an Athlon for less than you could buy a much faster modern CPU. I really recommend looking at going with mostly or entirely new hardware, especially if price is not a big concern. You'll get increased reliability, longevity, and upgradeability with new hardware. Trying to cobble together an "upgrade" out of parts lying around is often tempting, but usually not that fruitful in my experience.

That being said, if you're set on utilizing the spare AMD motherboard you have, I think I've got an Athlon 64 X2 CPU just sitting around collecting dust, so if we can verify it's compatible with the motherboard, then you can have it if you're willing to pay shipping.

- Oshyan

wraith808:
Or for $200 you could get a Case+PSU (dunno how quiet), motherboard, CPU, and RAM that ought to best your current system in basically every way:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.352997
(onboard graphics)
Add your own hard drive, transfer the DVD-ROM from your old system, and you're set.
-JavaJones (March 17, 2010, 12:33 PM)
--- End quote ---

Actually, I don't know if this would be better than his current system, merely b/c of the CPU- celeron (even dual core) I'm really leery of vs a full P4... unless they've done some serious work on celerons that I don't know about in the past few iterations.

UPDATE: I did some research, as I've always dismissed Celerons, and it seems that they changed the die and increased the L2 cache, which are promising changes.  Does anyone know where there are comparisons of this new breed of Celerons vs non-Celeron processors?

JavaJones:
Things *have* changed quite a lot from the old Celerons (which actually, before the days of the P4, were well respected in many cases, particularly for overclocking - P4 gen Celerons were terrible because P4 depended so much on its caches).

The newer Celerons are based on the "Core" architecture, are quite efficient and, while having smaller caches and in many cases no 64 bit support and no virtualization support (although in this particular case both appear to be included), are still quite good in performance, especially for the price. The equivalent "Core" architecture speed to a P4 is almost 50%, e.g. a 1.5Ghz Core CPU can do about as well as a 3.0Ghz P4. That particular Celeron being 2.5Ghz *and* dual-core would pretty much kill the P4, believe it or not.

This is why I say it's not worth upgrading the existing components, because a $50 CPU can give you 2x or more the performance of an old P4 these days.

- Oshyan

daddydave:
Of the specs you currently have, 1GB stands out as the one thing I couldn't live with. I hated running Vista in 1GB so I when I upgraded (motherboard+cpu+memory) I made sure I would be able to install at least 8GB memory, which I have. (Which required the 64 bit version of Windows 7, by the way). A memory upgrade to me has the most bang for the buck of any upgrade.

By the way 4GB in 32 bit Windows shows up as 3GB, but 8GB in 64 bit Windows shows up as the full 8GB. "Google it."

Next thing would be graphics card, just to make the Vista/Windows 7 visual effects run nicer. (Don't know if you are one of those who plan on running Windows XP for the next decade or not  ;) I actually ran Windows 2000 on my home system for 7 years. :o ) You also didn't mention if you are a hardcore gamer (sounds like not), in which case you're probably spending more on graphics and sound than I spend on my whole system.

If you go with some kind of motherboard+cpu+memory combo, really do your homework to make sure the pieces will work together. As you probably know, you can buy preconfigured combos sold as a set, but sometimes you can get better deals buying each piece from a different company.

Good luck!

Innuendo:
I was going to jump into this thread & proclaim how timely this thread is as I have finally decided to upgrade my venerable 5 year old system, but Stephen seems to be going in a totally different direction than I want to go.

My eye is getting a system with some legs like an i7-based system with the goal of getting another 3-5 years out of it. Right now most of my free time is cruising the net looking for good deals, sales, and specials.

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