- Joined
- Jan 8, 2002
- Location
- Seattle, WA
Heres my situation:
I love duallies, and 3 of my last 4 systems have been dual (bp6, (single proc athlon), vp6, now an a7m266-d with durons). BUT i dont have the cash or power need anymore to be sitting on a ~200 dollar mobo with two forty dollar cpus. Just seems wrong somehow, and I dont have the cash to upgrade the CPUs considerably. But what I can (and want to) do is sell it all, and get a nice single cpu setup...with a motherboard more like 100 bucks. Now the thing is, I'm so out of the loop with regard to current single cpu mobos, reliability problems, and most importantly price/performance ratios that I have no idea what to get! I was thinking of nforce2 with an xp ~2400 or so, or of an 845 chipset board but frankly, I don't know which.
I want something which will let me use a fairly low noise heatsink (like my current ax-7's), and will either be really fast in the first place (2400+) or will overclock very well without needing extreme cooling measures (p4 1.6a or something).
I figure that I have about:
175 for the mobo+usb2 card (a7m266-d)
30 each cpu (duron 1.3)
50 for the heatsinks (2x ax-7)
90 for the memory (2x 256 meg ecc crucial sticks iirc)
So I have ~375 on my hands to get a new motherboard, memory, cpu, and a heatsink (unless i keep one ax-7 if i go with an amd system, in which case i have 350 for all but a hsf). I'm also willing to pay a little in addition to what i get if it makes a discernable difference.
This could probably get me:
a p4@ 2.4B (190-ish)
an i845 mobo (maybe 100?) (and suggest better chipsets please! I've heard great things (from the front page at least) about the albatron board)
512 of pc2700 (90-ish)
OR:
2400+ (173) <---would it be better just to get a cheap+fast 1600+, or is the upgrade path not going to get much past the 2700+ anyways?
a7n8x (120)<----a7n8x? a7v8x? which is the good nf2 board?
512 of 2700 (would i need 3200 to max out the chip?)
Thanks for the input, I feel like a moron having not kept track of current "hot" motherboards and such.
PS performance-wise, I want something very zippy in regular applications, with linux and xp pro support, and with enough power to NOT be the bottleneck in ut2k3 etc...
I love duallies, and 3 of my last 4 systems have been dual (bp6, (single proc athlon), vp6, now an a7m266-d with durons). BUT i dont have the cash or power need anymore to be sitting on a ~200 dollar mobo with two forty dollar cpus. Just seems wrong somehow, and I dont have the cash to upgrade the CPUs considerably. But what I can (and want to) do is sell it all, and get a nice single cpu setup...with a motherboard more like 100 bucks. Now the thing is, I'm so out of the loop with regard to current single cpu mobos, reliability problems, and most importantly price/performance ratios that I have no idea what to get! I was thinking of nforce2 with an xp ~2400 or so, or of an 845 chipset board but frankly, I don't know which.
I want something which will let me use a fairly low noise heatsink (like my current ax-7's), and will either be really fast in the first place (2400+) or will overclock very well without needing extreme cooling measures (p4 1.6a or something).
I figure that I have about:
175 for the mobo+usb2 card (a7m266-d)
30 each cpu (duron 1.3)
50 for the heatsinks (2x ax-7)
90 for the memory (2x 256 meg ecc crucial sticks iirc)
So I have ~375 on my hands to get a new motherboard, memory, cpu, and a heatsink (unless i keep one ax-7 if i go with an amd system, in which case i have 350 for all but a hsf). I'm also willing to pay a little in addition to what i get if it makes a discernable difference.
This could probably get me:
a p4@ 2.4B (190-ish)
an i845 mobo (maybe 100?) (and suggest better chipsets please! I've heard great things (from the front page at least) about the albatron board)
512 of pc2700 (90-ish)
OR:
2400+ (173) <---would it be better just to get a cheap+fast 1600+, or is the upgrade path not going to get much past the 2700+ anyways?
a7n8x (120)<----a7n8x? a7v8x? which is the good nf2 board?
512 of 2700 (would i need 3200 to max out the chip?)
Thanks for the input, I feel like a moron having not kept track of current "hot" motherboards and such.
PS performance-wise, I want something very zippy in regular applications, with linux and xp pro support, and with enough power to NOT be the bottleneck in ut2k3 etc...
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