Final Upgrade on old reliable before I jump to Opterons - Any Suggestions?

[BillHarrison]

Hey SMP'ers. I am running a pair of XP TBRED 1700+ cpus with l5 mod at 2320mhz Each on Air running on my Asus A7m266d. 512mb of registered Crucial PC2100 ram, 2x 100gb WD JB 8mb Cache drives. Radeon 8500 AIW video card.

Time for an upgrade. I am looking to do an intermediate upgrade before I move onto a dual Opteron system. Its not quite time for that yet, as prices are not quite where I want them to be. But, the components I buy now I want to migrate forward with me to the opteron system, so when I buy, I am keeping that in mind.

Here is what I have in mind, and any input would be greatly appreciated.

1st: I feel the need for more speed, which, I am hoping to get 200 extra mhz by going to Athlon XP Mobile 2600+ barton chips. The extra cache and megahertz should give me a nice little performance boost. I will be doing the mod so that I can change multipliers etc from windows. Seems like a good plan to me, and I will be happy to get 2500-2600mhz out of these.

2nd: I am considering getting 2 gig (2x 1gig) registered PC3200 dimms, which should be useable in my opteron to come in a year or so, the extra ram should give me a nice performance increase

3rd: A pair of WD Raptors running raid 1 on a raid controller, should improve my disk performance, and I will retire my 2 large drives to pure storage, and use the raid array for my system files

4th: And this is the iffiest for me : I need a better video card, as the 8500 is really showing its age. X800 looks good to me, but I would want to get 2 years out of it, and it seems buying AGP now might not be the way to go on a pricey card such as this, but I am stuck with AGP. Would I be better off to go 9800 AIW for now, and save the money for the x800 after I jump to opteron, with PCI Extreme?

THanks for any input! Thanks

BILL

 

[cmcquistion]

I would skip item 1. You really aren't going to get any benefit from another 200 MHz, even IF you can reach it. I honestly think it would be a waste of money.

Item 2 and 3 look good.

Item 4: I would go the cheap route and get a 9800, now. After this, you can wait for a while and see how PCI Express video cards and motheboards pan out (saving your money for that big jump, when you have to buy a new motherboard, CPU's, and video card.) Of course, there is a chance that the next generation PCI Express motherboard is going to require DDR2, which negates your investment in memory, now.

 

[9mmCensor]

Item 4: I would go the cheap route and get a 9800, now.

Or even look into a 9500 or 9700 np or pro. Some 9500 can softmod to 9700s, but both stock will be much better than the 8500.

 

[MameXP]

OR GF 5900nu

I seriously doubt getting 2.6ghz dual AthlonXPs is possible. Its not about the chips but the board. so I would skip that step1

 

[dustybyrd]

I would skip item 1. You really aren't going to get any benefit from another 200 MHz, even IF you can reach it. I honestly think it would be a waste of money.

Item 2 and 3 look good.

Item 4: I would go the cheap route and get a 9800, now. After this, you can wait for a while and see how PCI Express video cards and motheboards pan out (saving your money for that big jump, when you have to buy a new motherboard, CPU's, and video card.) Of course, there is a chance that the next generation PCI Express motherboard is going to require DDR2, which negates your investment in memory, now.

i agree with all of this....

i have an a7m266-d with dual 2.415ghz (you will probably not get dual 2.5+ghz without water cooling and luck)...and i had dual 2.3ghz tbred's and the only difference in speed that i really notice is in the thrill ....well maybe i can encode a movie a few minutes faster...

also, you might want the 9700pro if you can find it, since it's only ~10% slower then the 9800pro and cost only $135 now...

 

[Audioaficionado]

Two Raptors in RAID 1 isn't going to improve hard drive performance one whit. Even RAID 0 isn't going to make that much of a differance. I'd suggest getting either the 37Gb or 74Gb Raptor and then getting a nice 250Gb SATA drive for storage and skipping RAID entirely. If you really have to have RAID then go RAID 5 with 3 or more Raptors and have performance and data protection.