P4 Mobo upgrade options...

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I have a P4 2.9Ghz mobo from an OEM typr Pc bought a couple of years ago. Having plucked p the courage to think about changing the motherboard I'm trying to work out the options I have for a quick upgrade that doesn't cost a bomb#

I already have 2 IDE HDD and a dvd multi burner, 2 512Mb DDR 3200 sticks and a crappy AGP Graphics card. So I want to use these parts rather than spend a fortune of new Sata drives, DD2 memory and the like. I do want to upgrade to a PCI-e GPU and that would be the main reason for the upgrade.

In the future i'll be sorting out a super-rig for my own devilish purposes but I'd like to squeeze the most I can out of my current puter first...

 

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Hi

If you got a new board with SATA controllers, you can get bridges for them to enable to keep using the old PATA drives

Depending on your budget though, you can get 1GB DDR2 sticks for fairly cheap though and you'll notice a big difference in performance. Look at Novatech or Aria or similar sites

 

Can't be doing with bridges and stuff, like I said when I do a full upgrade I'll buy a puter with all of this stuff already sorted out rather than arse around with the case I have know which I'm not overly fond off anyway (HP case is a bit too plasticy round the optical drives for me).

The prob with buying all new DDR2 is that I'd want at least 2Gig of it and my budget isn't going to strech to that. So the MB needs to be DDR compliant to take advatage of the 1 gig I already have. I don't need more than two slots for the ram becuase I won't bother to chuck in much more Ram beforem I do a complete sustem upgrade.

I've looked at Novatech and ebuyer but seemed like all the mobo were Sata based with only one IDE controller and I'd need two. I'd be happy with a mobo with Sata slots as long as two IDE were there.

It;s really an upgrade to PCI-E graphics I'm after. Just wondered what other people thought....

 

I not an expert on the current motherboards, but I think you will find that DDR2, PCI-E and SATA are pretty much the norm now!

Harry.

 

I still use AGP 8x for very high end gaming. Do you have a large screen?

 

17" I think, Just finding a couple of games are slogging my Graphics card a bit and would like to just up the power. The AGP options I've seen don't really meet my specs and price expectations but some PCI-E options appeal to me. Unless some one can point me in the direction of a good 258mb+ AGPx8 card for somewhere in the region of £50 (give or take). I'm not a GPU junkie so the difference between some of the cards is a little confusing...

 

Are you keeping your current processor then? What socket is it?

 

ummmm, thats a great question. Is there an easy way to find out?

 

Easiest way is to look at the manual that came with the motherboard.

Also - if this board is 2 years old a replacement board might not be compatable with your PSU.

Harry.

 

Do you know ya mobo make/model? Download and run something like everest if your not sure.

 

You do know you can get a 1950XTX AGP video card that'll kick out some serious gaming frame rates, right?

 

for like £200 maybe but I don't want to spend that much £60 mobo and £60 GPU still saves me £80 and I get to fiddle about with the PC!!

 

If you can find one, an X850XT is affordable and still kicks out the frames. I bought mine about 8 months ago for around $110.