Mobo and CPU upgrade advice.

fingleburt

Its upgrade time for me, I currently have an Athlon Tbird 1.2ghz, Abit KT7A with 256megs SDRam. I have £150 budget but just cant get my head around these new AMD chips with their names and the ddr so need a lil bit of help. Just need the cpu,mobo an ram is that achievable for only £150?

TIA.

fingleburt

No ones got any advice for me?, well ive spec'd up some items let me know if you think it'll give me a speed boost:

PcChips M848ALU SKT A SIS 748 400 DDR AGPx8 ATA133 6CH Sound/lAN/USB 2.0 will Take Upto a 3.2+ AMD Athlon XP And Sempron CPU's Retail Box



AMD Sempron 3000+ / 2.0ghz (SDA3000BOX) FSB333 L2-512kb Cache Skt A Retail Boxed Processor With 3 Year Warranty, includes heatsink and fan.



2x Crucial 256MB DDR PC3200 400MHz 184pin Memory Module

All that for just £151.79 including delivery from our nice friends at ebuyer. Good deal?, could I do better with a different cpu?

TIA

xplo5iv

fingleburt wrote:

No ones got any advice for me?, well ive spec'd up some items let me know if you think it'll give me a speed boost:

PcChips M848ALU SKT A SIS 748 400 DDR AGPx8 ATA133 6CH Sound/lAN/USB 2.0 will Take Upto a 3.2+ AMD Athlon XP And Sempron CPU's Retail Box



AMD Sempron 3000+ / 2.0ghz (SDA3000BOX) FSB333 L2-512kb Cache Skt A Retail Boxed Processor With 3 Year Warranty, includes heatsink and fan.



2x Crucial 256MB DDR PC3200 400MHz 184pin Memory Module

All that for just £151.79 including delivery from our nice friends at ebuyer. Good deal?, could I do better with a different cpu?

TIA

Go for the Athlon XP2800 instead - about a quid more, but Semprons are about 400 slower than Athlons

Use a single stick of 512mb RAM - cheaper and leaves spare slot for later. (Two sticks is only any quicker on dual channel mobo)

That mobo is fine - I've got one

total £150.84 inc delivery

Jonathan

Hintza

Why not check out the Novatech varebones units...ypu should be able to get a deal there. I have just bought all the bits and had a PC built. In the end most of the kit came from Novatech. Reliable good customer support.


http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/bundles.html


check out other pc companies as well dabs, ebuyer etc

Hallsie

Keep the Ram from a decent supplier though. Anything from a company like Crucial is fine.

I've had people with loads of problems buying cheaper ram only for it to turn out to be faulty.

foot_loose

get a AMD and over clock it. ive got a 2600xp 1.9mhz i overclocked it it now runs at 2.2mhz

daniel_r_2

If you were able to squeeze another £20 into that budget you could get an:

AMD 64 bit 2800 cpu, mobo and 512 meg of DDR400 RAM

which for an extra £20 is a lot better option if you could afford it, 64 bit so future proof (well as far as computers can be anyway) and plenty of room for future expansion, video, memory etc

As to be honest the sempron is a bit of a dog, it performs slower than the old amd durons

daniel_r_2

Hallsie wrote:

Keep the Ram from a decent supplier though. Anything from a company like Crucial is fine.

I've had people with loads of problems buying cheaper ram only for it to turn out to be faulty.

The cheap ram seems to be a bit hit or miss, I normally stick to name brands, but for a few PC's ive built i decided to give the cheaper stuff a go and for a couple of them the RAM was great and performed well, but then for the rest it just didnt play ball, either errored on install of windows or conitinually crashed when in use.

Sent them back to be tested, turned out they were fautly and a refund given so no problems there, but i think it does benefit you to go for a named brand as ive not once had a problem building PC's with that so far.

blinky

If you want to stick with socketA the best option is The Mobile (BArton core) 2500+. They overclock very well.

http://www.cpucitystore.co.uk/catalog/default.php?cPath=28_29_31

I don't know what processors your KT7A supports up to - it depends on the revision for official support (unofficially they support more) which could lead to a very cheap upgrade. Anyway at 1400Mhz you are already partly limited by the lack of bandwidth of SD RAM.

For a motherboard on Socket A I would go for one based on the Nforce2 400 Chipset. If you can find an ultra version it should have the excellent Nvidia SoundStorm for audio. The Nforce chipsets are light years ahead of the VIA ones.

2x256Mb or 2x512Mb DDR for the memory.

SDRAM is quite expensive now and the Abit is a solid board so you should get a reasonable price for them.

PC Chips are the lowest quality motherboard manufacturer. c.f. Abit which is one of the leaders.