right motherboard for my pc?

hiya

Im planning to upgrade my pc soon and i'm gonna get an athlon xp 3000+
and a motherboard to go with it

iv got quite alot set up in my current pc and want to keep as much as
possible, iv got 1gb of 166 SDRAM (i think thats wat type it is)

is it possible for me to keep my RAM but change my motherboard and
processor?

thanks for any advice

ps
whichever motherboard i get it needs to support an ATA133 hard drive,
because iv got 2 of them

On 19 Oct 2003 09:47:43 -0700, markyb15.TakeThisOut@hotmail.com (Marky B) wrote:
 >Im planning to upgrade my pc soon and i'm gonna get an athlon xp 3000+
 >and a motherboard to go with it
 >
 >iv got quite alot set up in my current pc and want to keep as much as
 >possible, iv got 1gb of 166 SDRAM (i think thats wat type it is)

You might want to do a bit more checking as to just what type of
memory you've got. There's not really any such thing as "166 SDRAM",
the closest is probably PC133 SDRAM, or possibly the marketing-speak
misnamed "PC166 SDRAM".

 >is it possible for me to keep my RAM but change my motherboard and
 >processor?

I'm not aware of any motherboard that would support PC133 SDRAM and an
AthlonXP 3000+ processor, so probably no.

Even if there is though, it's a DUMB idea. Your memory is every bit
as outdated as any CPU that you're likely to have, so if you go to a
really high-end CPU with that old memory, your brand spanking new
processor is going to spend 99% of it's time sitting around waiting
for the memory to catch up. Besides, memory is cheap, you can buy a
pair of 512MB, PC3200 DDR SDRAM modules for $90 a piece from
<a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.crucial.com." target="_blank">www.crucial.com.</a> Total cost of $180 to replace your 1GB of memory.

FWIW, an AthlonXP 2600+ and 1GB of PC3200 DDR SDRAM would cost you
about the same as an AthlonXP 3000+ alone. If you were to compare an
AthlonXP 3000+ with PC133 SDRAM (if such a system exists) to an
AthlonXP 2600+ with PC3200 DDR SDRAM, the latter would be MUCH faster.

 >whichever motherboard i get it needs to support an ATA133 hard drive,
 >because iv got 2 of them

All current boards support either ATA100 or ATA133, either of which
will support your hard drive just fine (and with absolutely no
performance loss if you drop down to ATA100 mode).

As for boards, my recommendation to start with is that you look for
something with an nVidia nForce2 chipset. This is not only the
fastest chipset available for AthlonXP processors, it's also the most
stable and reliable IMO. I've had much better luck with nVidia's
drivers than of those from any other chipset manufacturer, especially
those that produce chipsets for AMD processors (ie all of them other
than Intel).

A few good ones that you might want to look at are:

MSI K7N2 Delta
Asus A7N8X-X
Gigabyte GA-7N400E

All three of these boards should be pretty good. Performance among
all of them is comperable, and the price should also be very similar.
All three also come in a few different models with some optional
features (Serial ATA, RAID, ethernet, high-end on-board sound, etc.)
which may or may not be of any use to you.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->