Upgrading-Stay with Intel?!

[Disgruntled Goat]

Hey all, I have an Abit BH-6 mobo, not the best but it works and a PII 450@ 558 at 2 volts, I just put it to 2.2v so it wouldn't stall on Quake II, I dunno, it always gives me trouble on that game, the rest is ok. Anyway, I'm looking to upgrade. I have about 300 bucks to spend, I was thinking about going duron or Tbird but then I have to get a new mobo and stuff and I'm not the best when messing around with that kind of stuff.

I was thinking a PIII E @700 for 130 dollars I seen then with an FCPGA and a 7000rpm fan for about 200 dollars? Will that be good with my BH6 or will my bh6 be a pos? ;)

Or I wish thinking ABIT KT7A with an 800 TBird and fan for about 275 or so.

Heck, maybe even a celeron, I seen a few that reach 1100, that would ne nice for bragging rights at school ;)


Thanks ;)

[Phil]

I would probabally go for an 800mhz duron and the abit KT7A, or if you want to spend more the Asus A7A266 DDR/PC100/PC133 and a fast tbird will do you good, I believe this board takes both ddr sdram and normal sdram so if you don't want to buy new memory now you can use your old memory or you could buy a stick of ddr sdram, but this would mean a slower tbird. the duron system is the best value but you won't be able to beat the performance of a ddr tbird system

[Spode]

I disagree. No matter how much I love AMD, I reckon intel MIGHT be his path. I think the BH6 is just like the original BE6 but without ATA/66? Well, I put a celeron @1000mhz in my dads Be6 and it smoked. so that may be a good option for you. But as far as windows performance goes - harddrive is where it's at.

[Phil]

at the end of the day it's up to him, if he only wants to spend less than $100 on a celeron and heatsink then that is obviously his best bet, if he has more to spend though he may as well make a larger upgrade as that celeron would only be about 40% or so faster than his existing setup, where as the tbird would be close to 2x as fast

[Commited]

AMD is a reliable and easy setup.
Intel is quality & if you get a slotket (assuming your board is slot 1) and a celly 2 600 overclock it to a gig. should be fairly easy. Spend more money on the cooling then! :D

[Phil]

it's not that easy to get a 600 to a gig, they go to 900 really easy but 1ghz can be a lot of messing about or just luck, I managed to do it after burning in for a few months (I don't care how it works it just apeared to)

[ken257]

At this point for new systems I always recomend AMD but this is an upgrade and if you need to save $ and are not great with messing around changing hardware stay with intel. I would recomend a P3 over a Celeron as there is quite a diff in gaming between the two, a 700e would be a good choice since there is plenty of room to oc the fsb.

[Nomis]

Disgruntled Goat, Here the deal, Your bh6 motherboard bios probably isn't getting update from abit anymore. Being an Intel BX chipset, your motherboard will not boot with a cCO stepping Celeron or P3 and your motherboard won't post anything higher than 1GHz correctly. If you want to stick with this motherboard, find a cBO P3-700 which is good, cheap and powerful, easy 933MHz+.

[GDawg]

Nomis (Mar 21, 2001 07:59 p.m.):
Disgruntled Goat, Here the deal, Your bh6 motherboard bios probably isn't getting update from abit anymore. Being an Intel BX chipset, your motherboard will not boot with a cCO stepping Celeron or P3 and your motherboard won't post anything higher than 1GHz correctly. If you want to stick with this motherboard, find a cBO P3-700 which is good, cheap and powerful, easy 933MHz+.On the BH6, the proc you can use depends on the rev bios you have. Rev 1.0 or 1.1 See ABit web site. Your looking to go cheap, like I was. Here's what I did. cC0 633Mhz @ 980 @ 1.85v @ 84F on a ABit BH6 FSB103 PC100 mem GldnOrb Extra case fans and airflow holes. Starts w98 @ 112FSB, but locks up. Not enough tweaks on this mb. Paid a few extra bucks for a pretested 950 guarenteed proc from OverclockersWarehouse.com Expect to wait a few weeks. They're behind in pretesting. Came to $140 with the orb. Not the best, but were talkin cheap here. The pretesting is key. Lots of junk out there. The increase from 950 to 980 comes from softfsb. Gets 93 frames Q3D1 with all the candy @1024/32 & GF2 Also the newer chips run at lower voltage so cooling is less a prob. This might be the easy way out. A new mb with new issues is pushing your budget.

[Phil]

don't always go off what the manufacturer says it supports, a slocket can work wonders for old boards, I have an old qdi bx board from before even the p3 katmai and it supports the latest cCO coppermines

[Disgruntled Goat]

Thanks all for the replies- very interesting on the responses. I will have to look into some of it. The dude that talked about the Hard drive, I have a seagate cheetah 10k rpm SCSI if that helps any. Well, the celeron looks kind of nice to me now, all of you were talking about it and they don't cost too much.


Thanks again. Disgruntled Goat