My motherboard died :mad:

water

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Oct 29, 2004
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So apparently my luck with computer parts has finally run out. After almost 5 years with no parts ever going bad I've had two fail on me in the last couple of months. Do you think they were feeling mistreated or forgotten because of the new car and all the talk of buying another gun? That I do not know, what I do know however is that I need some replacement parts, and would like some advice on what I should buy.

As far as the motherboard goes I don't have a huge manu preference. I've had good experiences with Gigabyte hardware, and would go with ASUS or one of the other "better" builders, but prefer to stear clear of MSI, ECS, and all of the other budget guys.

My old system was an Athlon XP 2500+ with 1gig of PC2700, so my question is what will give me the biggest increase in performance for less than $350. I'd like to get something that is AMD/socket 939 so that I can have some room to upgrade if I feel the need, or something Intel comparable (probably not much of that option), I also need something with an AGP slot to carry of my 6800GT (I'll be buying a new system next year with an full PCI-E board and graphics setup).

Here are the options I've been going over, any suggestions will be appreciated.

1) Buy an Athlon 64 3800+ and motherboard, carry over my existing memory.
2) Buy an Athlon 64 3000+ or 3200+ with 1gb of PC3200 or faster.
3) Get a processor/mobo combo that's even less expensive than a 3000+ but then get 2gb of RAM.
 
Do me a favor and check your powersupply and make sure its within 5%. I switched out and burned out one board because my PS was 7% below tollerance. It never occured to me because it only locked up every other week.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813157081 look for mainboards similar to this that have a ULI chipset. there are others that have both PCI express and AGP but most of the others AGP slots are electrically compatible only, thus your AGP card is running in PCI mode.
 
I recently bought an Asus motherboard from hell
Thing would not work for a week then as if by magic one night it made the all mighty beep of power when booting up.
True story.

I went from an Athlon XP 3200 to an Athlon 64 3500, 64 runs at a slower speed... but by christ is it a big difference.
Quake 4 running on high settings with no frame rate loss, compared to the week before where I was struggling to run it at 800x600 at 30fps.
Only thing I changed was my CPU+Mobo.

I doubt you'll notice a difference if you change your memory unless you're inhuman.
So i'd probably go all out on mobo+cpu.
 
I have found it is never a poor investment to buy as much RAM as you can afford. I've found its hard to completely max out a processor now a days, so take that for what you will.
 
theacoustician said:
I have found it is never a poor investment to buy as much RAM as you can afford. I've found its hard to completely max out a processor now a days, so take that for what you will.
I think it really depends on what you do. BF2 works best w/ 2GB of RAM, but for most stuff it is overkill.