posted 11-30- 08:06 PM               

Totally depends on your finances.

It sounds like money might be tight if your planing on sticking with the banshee (great card for its age BTW)

I would say get an asus or abit MB and a duron 800.

You can always drop in an athlon later on.

posted 11-30- 08:09 PM               

BTW.

Correct me if i'm wrong guys, but if he had the money for an athlon chip.

Wouldn't performance actually be better if he still got the duron and dropping in another 128 megs of ram?

I could see that being better

Then it would be time for a new vid card.

posted 11-30- 09:17 PM               

Welp dell will sell it to ya

To bad its slower then pc 133 ram in most cases.

As is the p4 1.4 slower then the athlon 1.2 in most cases.

Don't be fooled by the hype jag.

posted 11-30- 10:26 PM               

------------------
-Sv =FC=

WWI in SDOE!

posted 11-30- 10:28 PM               

Wacky SV.

THe athlon is always tested as WAY faster then cels

I'll take that athlon off your hands.

posted 11-30- 10:31 PM               

Jerry its the rambus ram

Intel is selling the p4s bundled with 64 or 128 megs of ram. cause the stuff is so freaking expensive

I think they are subsidizing it just to get people to buy the chip

posted 12-01- 01:52 PM               

When/if you do go AMD/VIA, you WILL run into quirky stuff until you get VIA drivers installed and the system rebooted. When installing OS, I'd recommend nothing but the essentials on the board until you get those drivers installed.

My previous AMD system, the k6-2 350mhz w/ FIC V503+, has been a trooper. It would occasionally crash at leas once during 3-5 hours of gaming. Then again, the memory was generic too...

Regardless of processor type, make sure you DO NOT skimp on memory. Buy good memory with a decent latency (corsair, mushkin, crucial etc.). I knew that good memory was a must, but thought I could get away with generic ram anyway. Well, after trying my new module in my old system for a few days (while waiting for parts to arrive), it became clear what my crashing problem over the past 2 years was. The extra cost of good brand-name ram (about $50US difference) would gladly have been paid to avoid the trouble I experienced for going generic.

posted 12-01- 10:56 PM               

There may be a cheaper way to go for now. Check to see if there's a bios upgrade for your MB that will support the faster Celerons. One of the systems I have is an older LX chipset Diamond board. It will support a PII up to 333MHZ, but the bios upgrades allow it to supprt up to a 533MHZ Celeron.

If that's possible, I'd upgrade the CPU and take the savings as the starter for a future upgrade.

Why? First DDR ram. The new DDR ram MB's for AMD's are starting to hit the market. One memory vendor now has certified 150MHZ DDR ram they're supplying to developers, and they are working on 200MHZ DDR ram. DDR ram will quickly be cheaper than SDRAM. I have a friend that's a PC retailer and he told me he can buy 133MHZ DDR ram cheaper (wholesale) than he can get 133MHZ SDRAM!

Next. AMD's. The next generation of AMD chips will have full SSE support. If you think an Athlon kicks butt on a PIII now, wait until these babies are released. Also, the AMD 64 bit CPU's will actually be built so they can run 32 bit applications as if they were 2 32 bit CPU's in parallel. This will give a whopping performance increase to 32bit 3D applications and any other CPU intensive application. (According to AMD, software will NOT need to support SMP in order to see this benefit)

Beware the P4, there are still problems in Intel's development pipeline. Also, Intel is working on a chipset to support DDR ram for the P4, but they ran into some major bugs (this is becoming a trend with Intel).

Within the next 4 months, there will be some major releases of hardware that will drastically improve hardware performance. I'd save my money for them. This will almost be like the transition from the Pentium using fast page SIMMS to the PII using SDRAM, but things will go a LOT faster.

------------------
"Where'd he GO!?!?"
thunk-thunk-thunk-zing-OUCH
That answered my question

posted 12-02- 12:07 AM               

But this just in: I have a PCI Voodoo3 card. Someone told be that the PCI is killing me! I just ordered an AGP Voodoo5, I will report if this fixes my system's abilities.