Upgrade or new?!?

[emailrob]

Bit of a dilemma.

I have the Abit KT7a-raid, with Athlon 900 and 384 (256+128) ish RAM on board. My choices are:

Buy the 1.4G Thunderbird for about £50, one stick of 512 PC133 for about £45 from Crucial, and that's all

or

Buy new motherboard (prob DDR), 1800 XP and whole new RAM (DDR more expensive).

I'd appreciate some guidance on the likely speed differences between the two. The rest of my system works well at the moment, I think the chip and memory need a boost.

Any help would be great!

[RamonGTP]

The second option definatly... You currently have a fairly decent system that will suit you for still some time to come, so what i'd actually do is wait until AMD releases their 333MHz processors... Should be before the end of the year.

-Ramon

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Im running a Kt7a and its big drawback is SDR... go for the second option but put in a 2100+ CPu

--Jakk:t

[emailrob]

Ok thanks. So are there no real upgrade paths that will be worth the cash at the moment? I thought an upgrade to 1.4G for about £50 would be a reasonable increase, is it worth waiting a few months then?

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Definitley, wait a cuple of months, DDR is the ONLY way to go, you want DDR RAM and a high end XP in there, adding a newer tbird and SDRAM will serve only as an albeit expensive stopgap :(

--Jakk:t

[Juan Pena]

That is easy. If you can afford it, go for a new system. I think advantages outweigh disadvantages, if any.
Hope this will help.

[Hybridoma]

Originally posted by emailrob
Bit of a dilemma.

I have the Abit KT7a-raid, with Athlon 900 and 384 (256+128) ish RAM on board. My choices are:

Buy the 1.4G Thunderbird for about £50, one stick of 512 PC133 for about £45 from Crucial, and that's all

or

Buy new motherboard (prob DDR), 1800 XP and whole new RAM (DDR more expensive).

I'd appreciate some guidance on the likely speed differences between the two. The rest of my system works well at the moment, I think the chip and memory need a boost.

Any help would be great!

Go for the ECS K75SA mobo. It is inexpensive and you can keep your existing SDRAM but have the option to get DDR in the future (supports both kinds). This way you can upgrade at increments rather than shelling out for both mobo and ram.

Cheers
:t

btw - that's the setup I have (xp1800) and it works wonderfully.

[emailrob]

Originally posted by Hybridoma


Go for the ECS K75SA mobo. It is inexpensive and you can keep your existing SDRAM but have the option to get DDR in the future (supports both kinds). This way you can upgrade at increments rather than shelling out for both mobo and ram.

Cheers
:t

btw - that's the setup I have (xp1800) and it works wonderfully.

Sounds like quite a good idea. I can get one for about £50 in the UK, a chip for about the same (1600 or 1700 XP) and then upgrade to a DDR stick when I have the cash.

I've seen the FAQ's on here about the board, is there anything else (good or bad) I should know? Generally I've read good things about it.

In case it helps, there are the other bits I have in my PC:

Memorex 12 MAXX CD Writer
IBM 40Gb HD
32M GeForce 2 vid card
Old ISA soundcard ( I guess the onboard would do before forking out on a mid-range PCI card?)
USB digital camera (1.0 USB)
Standard PCI modem


Thanks in advance for any info,and for the help so far.

[j.m@talk]

Komplett R doing XP2000 for £70 :)

[Hybridoma]

emailrob:

The ECS mobo is great. One of the other nice things about it (besides the SDRAM/DDR ram support) is that is has an onboard LAN port so you will not need a network card for ethernet hookups.

Your equipment looks great. Looks like you have everything you need there. Since you don't have a souncard, however, you will have to use the onboard audio (which is just fine!).

My only advice is that when you build the system to only plug in the things you need to get going:
ie: cpu/heatsink/fan, the hard drive, cdrom, floppy, and one stick of ram.

This is good advice just in case you encounter a problem when you first boot up as it will make troubleshooting much easier. (However, when I built mine I plugged in 4 pci cards, hard drive, 2 sticks of ram, 2 cdroms, floppy, and it booted just fine!)

.....and the great thing about this mobo is that many many many people on this forum either have it or have used it in a system before. So you get lots of advice.
:)

Cheers

[Hybridoma]

ps - don't listen to the people recommending getting the "latest" and fastest cpu. Get an amd xp 1600-1800 since it is in the best price/performance range. Getting a few extra mhz from a 2100 or something for 50% more cost just isn't worth it in my opinion.

Save your money for more important things! Like wine.

:D

[emailrob]

Thanks for the good advice Hybridoma, things are settling into place now.

It's going to be a busy week!!

Thanks again

Rob

[Hybridoma]

Let us know how it turns out :)

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Yeah, if you can afford it £120 for a 2100+ is the one to go for, however the 1800+'s at around 70 quid are the best chip availiable for price to performance IMO

--Jakk:t

[AllGamer]

well the current mobo works good with the XP 1800+
so there's really no need in upgrading

since new CPUs and new DDR RAMs are around the corner

i think it'll be best to just get a new CPU and wait for a mobo + RAM upgrade later

:t

[Bigjakkstaffa]

AG, not so.. he needs a V1.3 revision Kt7a to be SURE that the XP can run in it.. any others (V1.0, 1.1, 1.2) may not run XP's... officially they cant... in practice its possibel but not certain to get an XP running on em all... to check theres asticker on the underside of the ISA socket that will have a revision number.

--Jakk:t

[emailrob]

And just my luck that I've not got v1.3, therefore I cannot upgrade above 1.4Gz.

However a Board that can support 1800+ and can take DDR is a great balance, hence I've ordered the Elite board and a 1700 XP chip (retail as I get a fan and 3yr warranty which is important.)

I'll let you know how the installation goes!!

[Bigjakkstaffa]

Good luck Rob ;)

Apparently the problem is all to do with the XP's power up routines, the original Kt7a's cant handle it properly... although it is reported in some cases it is possible to cheat it by booting up, and pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del straight away to make it soft reboot... personally though i think youve made the best chouce going for the DDR solution :)

--Jakk:t

[emailrob]

Originally posted by Bigjakkstaffa
Good luck Rob ;)

Apparently the problem is all to do with the XP's power up routines, the original Kt7a's cant handle it properly... although it is reported in some cases it is possible to cheat it by booting up, and pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del straight away to make it soft reboot... personally though i think youve made the best chouce going for the DDR solution :)

--Jakk:t

Me hope's so too!

[emailrob]

All installed ok as far as I can tell.
I've added the cards in one by one and they seem to be working ok.

Got an XP1700 retail in the end, and the board as discussed.

BIOS reports it as 1700+, SiSoft Sandra reports it on a par or slightly above an XP1800.

One question. at the moment I'm having to stick to my old SD RAM.

I have one PC100 128 and one PC133 256 stick.

Am I better to stick to the 256 on it's own, or are the two better together? I know that the memory will only run on PC100 (the lowest speed). My assumption is 384 of RAM in total at PC100 is better than 256 at 133?

Next step is obviously some DDR Ram, but this is going to have to wait!

What's the best place to start re tweaking, overclocking etc ?
I've seen posts on this but there is so much info not sure where to start!!

Thanks for the help

Rob

[Hybridoma]

Great! I am glad it is working. You have a good setup.

THat is a good question regarding the RAM. More at 100mhz or less at 133? Hmm. I do not know the answer to that question. But I would assume that if you're running at a lower bus speed of 100mhz it may have a slowing effect on other hardware....? Best to ask BILL about that!

I don't know much about overclocking either. BUt in my humble opinion I don't think it's worth it to stress a system just for a 5% gain in performance.

Good luck!:t

[Danger Dave]

;) HEllo,
Can I Get your old bits if you upgrade. please :x
come on you know you want to,
please please please please please, pritty please :D

[emailrob]

Thanks, can anyone answer the 133 vs 100 question?

Rob

[Hybridoma]

You may want to start a new message thread to get an answer to that question.

Cheers:)

[deadkenny]

Personally I would recommend going with the 256MB alone, at 133MHz. First, I'm not sure if your board supports 133 / 100 (FSB / memory) operation. If not, then you'd have to slow the processor down. Even if it does, you'd be running async which is less efficient. You should be able to live with 256MB until you're able to upgrade to DDR (assuming that's your plan).

[Peter M]

K7S5A cannot run CPU at 133 MHz with RAM at 100. So it's out with that PC100 stick, definitely ... or assert for yourself, at your own risk, whether that stick happens to work at 133 MHz with cautious timings selected. www.memtest86.com will help you find out.

[emailrob]

Thanks all, will certainly stick to 256 for the mo, and check out the memtest thingy.

Cheers

Rob