A Hardware Upgrade Configuration

[The Wizard]

Hello!

I am going to make a hardware upgrade and would like to have your advice. I have here the list of upgrades I was going to make. By the way, I need to keep my price points under 1,000 bucks, so no spendy suggestions!

First I was going to put in an Intel motherboard compatible with a 1.8 Ghz Pentium 4. Some people say this is overkill, but I think that the Pentiums perform better on certain programs than the AMDs, but I could be wrong. You tell me. Anyways, then I was going to slap on an additional 512 megabytes of DDR Ram. I only have a WIndows 98 OS, so maybe I should upgrade. Once again, I want to hear what you think. Ok, third I was debating whether I should get a GeForce 4 Ti 4400 or an ATI equivalent. Tell me what you think.

The Wizard

[curtybob]

search pricewatch for your processor. you should be pleasantly surprised at what you will get for what you planned to spend. go with windows XP, and if you don't plan on running 2 processors, go with home edition. memory wise, pc2700 is a good choice right now, pretty fast and not expensive. but buy brand names like crucial (micron), kingston, mushkin!, or corsair. lastly, hold off on the video card a little while, nvidia will soon release the geforce FX's, and the 5600 should be well within grasp for what you would spend on that ti 4400. i have read $150- $170.

[chrisinthesun20]

IMHO if price is important, then I would suggest AMD over Intel, as you will get more "bag for your buck". Something like a 2100+ (which will overclock very well - normally) or if you are not planning to overclock then go for a 2400+ - which is very much the sweetspot between price and performance at the moment, and runs at 2Ghz.

For a motherboard, I would recommend nForce 2 for AMD, either the ASUS or ABIT offerings. The ASUS A7N8X Deluxe I have is very good (in my opinion), but might be a bit expensive for your budget, but they also do a non-deluxe one with cheaper sound and no onboard LAN or firewire etc.....

At the moment for videocards I would have to recomment the ATI 9500 pro (or non pro which is cheaper) over the Ti4200 (these are the cards that are within your price range IMHO). The 9500 performs better than the Ti4200, although the drivers are not quite as mature as Nvidia's... oh, and intial benches show that the Geforce FX5600 actually performs worse than a Ti4400 (closer to a good Ti4200)......

Anyhow - let us know what you decide on and we'll give some (hopefully unbiased) comments!

[The Wizard]

Well it has been a while since I made that post, and I already have everything here at my pad except for the processor which is coming Tuesday. Here it is:

Kingwin Blue-Silver 201-t aluminum mag. case with three blue tinted windows, 5 80mm fans, 4 front USB 2.0 ports, and protected edges.

A TT Silent Purepower PSU 420 watts. dual fan

Asus P4G8x deluse mobo

Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz 533fsb 512 cache (soon to be OCed at 3.0 ghz

TT Spark 7+ heatsink

Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9500 PRO

1 80 gig SATA HDD by Seagate to be accompanied with my other 80 gig IDE dirve by WDJ

Robotics 56k modem

Microsoft wireless mouse and keyboard package. silver-black.

17 inch monitor, CRT



Well that's it folks. I hope you have some comments cuz I would love to hear them. Yours truly

The_Wizard, or whatever my name was. I sorta forgot