Which Hardware Upgrade?

[stompinne]

Hi, i have some money i want to spend on upgrading my hardware.
For the moment i have:

celeron 400mhz
memory 128 ram (100mhz)
drive 4 gb


On which item should i spend the money the best to get the best value?
Each item i actually want to upgrade, although i'm looking towards the pc-future developments. Which item-upgrade will give me the best value for money looking into the future, taking into account the manufacter-availability of these components?...............
:confused:

[Lycia]

Upgrade to an Athlon CPU and Motherboard. You'll need to buy ram as well if its DDR. DDR is a type of memory. PC66/100/133 is standard, DDR and RDRam are competing standards, with Intel supporting RDram and AMD going with DDR. Well now it looks like DDR, Double Data Rate (?), will win out with Intel making several DDR/P4 motherboards...

[stompinne]

maybe stupid question, but is the AMD ram compatible with Intel stuff and viceversa?

[fishninja007]

It really depends on how much money you have and what you use the computer for. As stompinne said, if you have the money for it, a new motherboard/cpu/memory is probably the most useful.

Short of that, more memory can't hurt since its so cheep right now, another 128Mb should be about $30. If you upgrade to an Athlon in the future you probably won't use this memory, but its only 30 bucks.

If you do CPU intensive stuff, games, video, mp3 encoding etc. a new processor would speed it up a bit. Again though, if you upgrade more later you'll probably not use the CPU and be out that $$. For that reason I usually don't like upgrading a CPU unless you do motherboard and memory at the same time.

For a general use PC, some games, some office applications, web browsing etc. your best bet is probably a new hard drive. On a system like that the HDD is probably the biggest bottleneck. Get an ATA-100 7200 RPM drive, big, maybe 40Gb+. It will probably be a bit faster than your current one and when you upgrade again you can keep this drive.

Last but not least, you could look into a new video card. Especially if you watch DVDs or do 3d gaming. They range from cheep (<$100) to expensive (>$300). Again, when you upgrade in the future you can keep this card.

Bottom line, I would do the MB/CPU/Memory if you can afford it now. Otherwise hard drive first, then video card if yours is old.

[fishninja007]

To answer the DDR memory question...

PIII CPUs use plain SDRAM. It is generally PC100 or PC133, referring to the speed in megahertz the memory runs at (100Mhz and 133Mhz respectively).

DDR memory is an update to normal SDRAM. It is used by some (most new) Athlon chipsets and very recently with some P4 chipsets. It also runs at 100Mhz or 133Mhz but does a trick so that it can move data twice per clock cycle so they say 200Mhz or 266Mhz. For marketing reasons the 200Mhz and 266Mhz DDR memory is called PC1800 and PC2100 respectively.

Finally, RDRAM is a completely new technology. A lot of people like it, a lot of people don't. It is used by most P4 chipsets.

The three are not compatible with eachother. If you have a PIII/celeron right now you are using SDRAM. If you upgrade to an Athlon you can't still use that same memory (well, you could with some motherboards, but it would be a waste). If you had an Athlon and used DDR memory now, you could potentially move to a P4 and use that same DDR memory, but why move _to_ Intel.

[wizard101uk]

I agree, why go to intel when AMD is cheaper and the Athlon is still kicking intels ***.
Even with there so called flagchip the P4.
Stay with AMD you will not be sorry.:D

[Comage]

Well, here's the big question: How much money are you able to set aside for your upgrade? It'll be easier for us to give you advice based on your budget. :)

[InnovaZero]

Budget system:

Duron 1Ghz
EPoX 8khal KT266A Mobo
256mb SDRam
GeForce 2 GTS-V 32mb
20GB ATA100 7,200 RPM

Price Range: $250-300

Fast System:

Athlon T-bird 1.2Ghz w/ 266fsb
EPoX 8kha+ KT266A Mobo
PC2100 256mb DDR Ram
GeForce 2 Ti/Pro/Ultra
40GB ATA100 7,200 RPM

Price Range: $400-450

Wicked system:
Athlon XP 1600+
Soyo Dragon+ KT266A w/Raid Mobo
PC2100 384mb or 512mb DDR Ram
GeForce3 Normal/Ti200/Ti500
40GB+ ATA133 10,000RPM

Price Range: $600-700

Hope this helped, these are great setups for their respected builds.