Please recommend me a basic desktop!PC Building expert needed!

maniac886

Hi,

I would like to buy a basic PC, anything from £150-£250 but it must be upgradeable. Also I have the following parts from my old desktop that need to be compatible with this new system....they are as follows;

2 x Maxtor Diamondmax 80GB 7200RPM ATA/133 8MB Cache
2 x Kingston 512MB DDR333 PC2700 NON-ECC CL2.5 DIMM
AGP 8X 256mb graphics card

The new PC needs to have decent on-board sound, either Athlon or P4,XP home and plenty of usb slots, CD Rewriter and DVD Reader/Writer would be an added bonus.

Can anyone find me anything...
Thanks in advance

webhamster

agp is dead , theres no new boards and its at end of life , so you will have no upgradeability using that part...unless.

You could try however a agp pcx combo boards , as long as its not a ddr2 you should be fine with the rest of your components and some future proofing having a pcx there.

google for asrock upgrade boards or dual agp pc express boards , then check out the major suppliers to see if they have , or can get , them in stock.

maniac886

What do you think of this?

I can put my agp graphics card into this plus upgrade the memory to 1gb.

Omertron

Couple of problems with that system.
1) The memory is a different speed to what you have (it's PC3200) which will mean that your memory will slow it down or even not be compatible with it. If it does work though, I doubt you would notice the difference...
2) It seems to only have 1 P-ATA connection (The same as your hard drives) and a CD-ROM is using that. This would leave you with 1 hard-drive without a connection.
3) The sound on the computer seems bog-standard, are you after 5.1 surround sound? If not, this will be fine

maniac886

In the end I decided to pay a little bit extra and get this one.

I will buy extra PC3200 512mb memory by selling the other two on ebay.
Also i believe i cannot have more than one ATA ide hard drive ...is there not a converter i can get so that i can use my ide hard drive in a sata socket...or if i wanted a third hard drive it would have to be a sata one?

Omertron

For a standard IDE motherboard slot, you can have 2 devices attached. Older motherboards have 2 IDE slots allowing you to have 4 devices (2 on each).

However, if you do not have a spare, you can get one of THESE to convert a P-ATA hard drive to S-ATA