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Mobo dying .... suggestions please on upgrading my system ...

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dk70:
Yep and VIA - Asus budget is more budget than Asrock. You will need 1 pci or sound card alone. Better than onboard even if you dont game. Those shops are busy with all the new stuff but since this is introduced about August Im sure it will pop up somewhere. More than a few think why buy new PCI-E when happy with AGP! Typical computer business, you need strange ULI chipset and less than famous brand to get more choices. Nvidia have bought ULI btw.

I would also prefer shop for this - or a smaller shopping/2nd hand community where people can be looked up in details. I generally dont trust so many online, others have used ebay with success  8)

Carol Haynes:
I need a minimum of 3 PCI slots (wireless card, sound card and TV card if I have to replace my AGP graphics) preferably more!

dk70:
You can get PCI-E based tv-cards - or PCI-E All-in-Wonder. More pci-e slots? Cant have it all but 3xpci, 1xagp, 2xpci-e should be enough for what you ask. Have to play along Asrock specs for this cheap solution. Not that they are bad.

Carol Haynes:
Any suggestions as to where to find these PCIe cards in the UK ?

Radeon AIW PCIe cards used to exist but I can't find anyone that sells them now and I haven't seen any PCIe cards other than graphics cards ???

f0dder:
As for 32- vs 64-bit XP, I haven't yet seen any reason to install 64bit even though I have an AMD64x2 4400+. It's very little software that can take advantage of the additional address space, and the extra & wider registers don't help that much for much software. So unless you have some software you know can take advantage of 64bit, it isn't worth it yet imho.
-f0dder (November 02, 2006, 09:36 AM)
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I was very disappointed to note that on my box which dual boots 32bit and 64bit XP that the 7zip internal benchmark ran faster under 32bit XP than under 64bit. In hindsight I should also have tested a 32bit exe running under 64bit XP, might do so later.

I never looked into this further, though it would be interesting to check out some other programs.
-Eóin (November 02, 2006, 09:45 AM)
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Was this a 64bit version of 7zip (sounds like it)? And which compiler was used for compiling it? x86-64 is still pretty new, so not all compilers are very mature yet. Embarassing that performance is *worse*, considering the new registers etc.

I thought AGP was basically part of the PCI bus (which is going to be there anyway) but presumably you can BIOS disable what you aren't using. I take your point though - but if I don't have an AGP interface I have to buy a PCIe graphics card (and/or TV card if I want to retain functionality) which is going to be even more expense.
-Carol Haynes
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Nope - the AGP is a separate bus, and it's like bolting on a bigger engine to an old car. And it's a relatively hacky architecture as well.

Btw, you can get PSUs that can work as both 20- and 24-pin, by detaching the extra 4 pins (and hell, if your motherboard has some spare room near the ATX power plug, detaching the pins isn't even necessary).

Oh, and for chipsets: there's only really two choices, intel and nvidia nforce. Stay away from everything else :)

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