19-03-2003 23:27									#1
	Advice on upgrades Browse Apolyton AD-FREE

The time has come to upgrade the machine. You may recall, some months ago, me complaining about regular crashes, and the fact that it was the motherboard. Well, this easter it gets replaced. Here's what I'm thinking of putting in instead, complete with prices from a cheap restailer I know of (www.infiniti.co.uk)- current system is Abit KT7-A, Athlon 800Mhz, 512 Mb RAM.

New system proposal:
Abit NF7-S - £99
AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (actually speed 2GHz, I believe) - £105
512Mb of DDR333 RAM - £48
Total upgrade cost - £252

Anyone got comments, approval, disapproval, horror-stories, decent retailers which are cheaper etc? Otherwise I'll probably order in the next week or two.

	19-03-2003 23:29									#2
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I'd wait for the final version before upgrading.

	20-03-2003 00:22									#3
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Final version of what?

	20-03-2003 01:39									#4
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Looks fine.

Pet peve though, 512Mb is 64MB.

	20-03-2003 06:03									#5
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Intriguing - I was always under the impression that Mb was correct for Megabytes. I stand corrected. I suppose if it were, Megabits would cause abbreviation difficulties...

Any further thoughts?

Last edited by Chowlett on 20-03-2003 at 06:10

	20-03-2003 07:29									#6
	Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

Check out the nForce2 mobos, such as the Asus A7N8X

	20-03-2003 07:30									#7
	Got spare money?

NF7-S is an nForce 2 mobo.

	20-03-2003 07:44									#8
	Increase Your PM Length

Good choice Chowlett, I got the same mobo you proposed and I'm satisfied with it!

btw dude that stuff is so cheap... although, how much is the £ to the €??

Btw I would go for the full **** 512 MB (400mhz) ram

and when taking a processor, I always take the one prior to the one whose price rises incredibly for just 100 mhz extra

	20-03-2003 15:43									#9
	Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

quote: Originally posted by Trajanus Good choice Chowlett, I got the same mobo you proposed and I'm satisfied with it! btw dude that stuff is so cheap... although, how much is the £ to the €??

£1=€1.47. Infiniti are a Glaswegian outfit that look like a complete bunch of cowboys if you visit the warehouse (f'rinstance, the guy on the cash desk is taking hundreds of pounds in notes, and stuffing them under the monitor until he gets time to put them in the desk-safe...) - but I've had and heard of no complaints with them. They're fast, reliable, knowledgable and cheap. I hope they stay that way.

quote: Btw I would go for the full **** 512 MB (400mhz) ram

Noted. Is it worth the £20 extra?

quote: and when taking a processor, I always take the one prior to the one whose price rises incredibly for just 100 mhz extra

Have done so - the 2400+ is £105, the 2600+ is £195, while the 2200+ is £86.

	20-03-2003 16:59									#10
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Well as far as I'm concerned I always take the best RAM, i'm no expert on this, but I think the extra cost is worth it.. of course I take it you want to do some heavy stuff on your computer (not just surfing and writing documents ) right!

	20-03-2003 17:04									#11
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Well, it doesn't need to be hugely top-end - but it does need upgrading for stability reasons, and it will run NWN, Morrowind and Q3. And probably newer stuff as well at some point.

	21-03-2003 00:01									#12
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There's no reason to use DDR400 on any Athlon, the system bus is currently 333MHz, so having memory going 400MHz instead of 333MHz doesn't help. The bottleneck should be obvious.

	25-03-2003 04:56									#13
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-=Bump=-

Last call for comments!

	25-03-2003 07:58									#14
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Get a nice CPU cooler like the Thermaltake Volcano 9, a heavy duty power supply, and an optical mouse.

	25-03-2003 08:35									#15
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Could anyone giving me advice on the best way to upgrade my system?

I have -
AMD Athlon 700mhz
256 MB RAM
Creative Sound Blaster Live!
Geforce 4400 MX (or something... it was like $80 at Best Buy this past summer)
16x DVD Drive (something like 56x CD)
32x... something fast - I forget and don't care - Rewritable Drive

I've got a nice monitor (19" and heavy as ****), keyboard, mouse and speakers - what I want is power for cheap. In my opinion I could live with the Sound Card, it's not a big deal, but the processor and ram are. I'm either going to get some small outfit to shove this stuff together or I'll have to buy most of it put together in a case so that I can just add stuff like the sound card (I've spent way too much time ****ing around with installing and uninstalling video cards and CD drives).

	25-03-2003 09:53									#16
	Got spare money?

If you want a cheap upgrade, probably a new mobo and a faster processor.