zero2dash

Ok, I have some extra money burning a hole in my pocket. 5 minutes ago marked the 2nd time in about three days I've almost spent a little over $100 on some PC parts. What I have now...

Iwill KK266 mobo
Athlon 1.4 cpu (not overclocked)
GeForce 2 MX400 64 meg card
512 megs PC133 ram
Plextor 12x (12x10x32 burner)
the rest of the PC is mainly schenanigans. 40 gig internal HD for Windows 2000/program storage, external 60 gig in a USB 2.0 enclosure for MP3/etc storage...internal Zip100, usual floppy etc.

...

What have I almost bought?

-I've waited for PC133 512 meg dimms to go down to where they are now for awhile now. I originally planned on buying three of them total; my mobo supports 3 of those dimms so I'd have a more gigs of RAM than processor speed (un-overclocked). Why would I do this? Sheer money-blowing-but-look-at-how-much-ram-I-have stupidity. I don't know what lot of good it would do especially considering Windows 2000 is a ram distribution champ and my system has never belched even when running PageMaker 7, Illustrator 10, and Photoshop 7 all at the same time (good ram hogs).

-I've also almost bought a LiteOn 48x burner because of how cheap they are (about $70 off Pricewatch). Granted I'm fine with my 12x Plextor, it takes 5 minutes give or take to burn a cd which is fast enough for me but I've thought regardless of getting a faster drive and the LiteOns are good for the cheap price.

...

Now, my main issue is with ram. Granted, my system runs fast (at least to me it is) but I don't know if I'd get a boost with a gig of ram, especially since it's PC133. With my current motherboard, it only takes PC100 or PC133, no DDR or anything else. Bleh. So I don't know if that large amount of ram will matter much with only being PC133.

I've also thought about overclocking my system in the past (I have a 7000 rpm copper core heatsink/fan that keeps my cpu under 45 degrees celsius) but didn't ever really have a reason to.

As for the burner...again I'm fine with my Plextor 12x I guess, I suppose the only reason I'd upgrade is because of the cheap price of the LiteOn but then again where's the 48x media? I haven't seen any and most media I see nowadays on sale (Memorex, Fuji I have the best luck with; I hate Imation now) is usually 24x or thereabout.

...

I have a 2nd PC, essentially it's old but stable and decent in speed. P3 866 with 384 megs of ram with a TNT2 card. I know you're saying "eww a TNT2 upgrade that P.O.S." but I don't use this 2nd pc much at all other than when friends come over and either we all use the net at the same time or we play some of the FPS that don't need high high end cards to play good (at least for me...Quake 3, Half-Life primarily). I've THOUGHT about selling this thing and either a) building a new desktop pc or b) buying a laptop. Of course I could build a new desktop pc for hella cheap...probably spend about $600 like I did on my Athlon setup and get an Athlon 2200xp, good mobo, good chunk of DDR ram etc. The laptop idea is mainly just for portability and whatnot...I don't know how much I would or would not use it. I'd love to have a PowerBook, I admit. I'm not a Mac person per se but PowerBooks are really *reeeeealy* nice but WAY too pricey for me. I'd opt for a $1200-$1600 Dell laptop most likely (but that's seriously stretching it and I think a laptop is more of a "wish I had one just for the neat-o factor but don't need one" dream).

...

QUESTION: What do you guys think I should do?
a) upgrade the ram at all? (pc133)
b) buy a burner
c) upgrade/build a new pc (mobo, cpu etc)
d) laptop?
e) save it for a rainy day (had to throw it in there anyway)

I'm not much into the vid card market just yet, I'm waiting for the new Radeon 9700 card...man that thing sounds like it's going to be the $#!t.

Thanks in advance for any/all advice etc.

Also...should I overclock my cpu? Will I really notice any speed increase or anything? <wondering>

gear02

I just got an ibook and I love it. It's small and it's really really cool. It's significantly much cheaper than a TI powerbook, though it doesn't have the G4 processor or a huge screen. However, I don't think the speed is a concern, especially if you get a memory upgrade for the ibook.

If you want to upgrade your computer, I don't suggest getting the 512MB of PC133 memory. The performance increase will not be as big as you think it would. I doubt you'll notice it unless you hammer your computer.

The two pieces of hardware that' holding your computer back is your motherboard and your graphics card.

If you want to upgrade your mobo, get a DDR system (obviously). I'd suggest the ABIT KR7, though I'm the wrong person to ask about the DDR boards since I haven't really looked into them for a long time. Upgrading your mobo means getting new RAM and maybe requires a new sound card if you have an integrated one. This the more expensive route, but it'll yield the largest performance increase.

Getting a video card would help too, but not as much.

You might even consider getting an NForce board. Again, ask someone else about it. It's basically a mobo with a built it graphics accelerator from NVidia.

Bires

If you game...buy a video card.
If you don't game...buy a new mobo with DDR memory.

__________________
Five years...

PoloM1

If you want to make you upgrade nice an gradual, you might want to consider getting somthing like the ECS K7S5A, it seems like it has pretty good performance and it can take both SDRAM and DDR, so you can keep your SDRam until you're ready to buy DDR. The only thing is that the K7S5A isn't an overclocker's board, but then, you don't overclock so that shouldn't be a problem.

sho.gun

Are you sure that Iwill only takes pc133 RAM?? I've never heard of any athlon boards running on memory besides pc2100+ DDR ram...

I visited newegg and tried to look for your motherboard but couldn't find the exact one. But I did find a IWILL KK266+ R (KK266 Plus-R) VIA Apollo KT133A. That one takes DDR RAM. So I'm not sure where everything stands at this point.

By the way, I also think that having over 1 gb of RAM is pretty much overkill... I'm currently on 512mb of pc2100 DDR and it runs everything *perfectly* without any slowdowns. Dreamweaver, video editing, photoshop, they all run fine. I just recently built a system for a friend using 256mb of DDR and to be frank I couldn't really notice a difference between it and my system. I'm sure there is a difference though.

About overclocking your CPU, you will probably gain a slight speed increase but then again your 1.4 ghz athlon is fast enough as it is. I'm not downplaying overclocking at all, there are a lot of people out there who do it and most do it because of the fun factor and know the consequences of an OC gone bad. To me it seems like if you really really want that extra smidgen of speed increase, you'd be better off investing in DDR RAM and a motherboard that supports DDR RAM.

I'm running on an MSI KT3 Ultra which supports up to pc2700 DDR RAM. ANother suggestion is get a RAID!!

anyways, good luck post anymore questions you might have.

LegendKiller

That board has a double pumped bus but only takes 133 SDRAM, its actuall quite common, it was a transitional board between SD and DDR. I have a 133mhz bus (266mhz double pumped) for my KT7A-RAID, but I have my proc running at 140 bus speed.

LK

PoloM1

I didn't know that some motherboards did that. Hey LK, I have a KT7A (one of the earlier versions) does that mean I also have a double pumped bus and is there a noticable difference in performance between a motherboard that has a double pumped bus and one that doesn't if they're both using SDRam?

sychen56

just buy a new computer !!! =P