Time to upgrade?

[dawgtuff]

I'm thinking of building another 'puter. This will be my 3rd one. I want the performance to be sugnificant over my present system, but at a low cost. Here's what I have:
P3 550e@733 133fsb
Soyo6vba133
256mb Infineon SDRAM@133 cas2
Kyro II(4500)
WD 20gb ATA66
SB Live value
Full size case w/300watt PS.
xtra fans and heat sinks
I like to make my upgrades in "giant leaps", so is now a good time or shall I wait?

[spidey_joe80@hotmail.com]

not too many giant leaps are comning soon (that i know of). Intel just released there northwood p4 and the athlon xp is still relatively new. The only thing i can see of interest in the near future is ddr 333 could be worth waiting for.

[dawgtuff]

You mean a 333mhz bus speed? I could go for that!

[Holodoc]

you can always wait for newer, faster things.....and
new things use to be expensive...

get a nice Athlon board with ATA RAID on it,
an Athlon XP....

:-))

[gibsinep]

Well all i can say is get some kind of ATHLON chip:D

with ddr

If you are a gamer then i would upgrade now. Must games are around or above 600mhz

[dawgtuff]

I can wait, my P3-733 will still be good for a time. Can anyone comment on Spidey's ddr333 comment?

[missiveusa]

As for Athlon platforms, Iwill is the only mainboard mfg. I know that has attempted 333MHz speeds with the XP-333. These speeds are achieved by a 166 MHz FSB DDR setting, which the board runs at reliably.

The KT-266A chipset is a DDR Athlon solution that is out now and pretty inexpensive, especially compared to Intel platforms. Anantech has a great mainboard roundup of this VIA chipset.

[spidey_joe80@hotmail.com]

I foud a good article (well i dont know if its good i havnt read it)
on ddr 333 (hey it is a good article) check it out.

[dawgtuff]

I've been doing a little research, and I think the cheapest way ($200)would be to go with a KT133a mobo and a 1.4 T-Bird. This way I can still use my ram and OC the T-Bird to 1.6 .
I tried to find some info on the real performance difference of 133 and 266 and came up with 10-20%, except bandwith, which was 40-50%. I couldn't find anything on 333 to 266/133 comparisons, but I'm sure a Athlon Hammer w/333 and 64 bit architecture is the way to go.....eventually.

[gibsinep]

yes the t-bird is a good choice.

[BigBlue66]

Hey yeah, I'm running an Athlon T-Bird 1.4GHz 266FSB on an MSI K7T Turbo2 KT133A with 1.0Gb of PC133.

It's plenty fast enough for me. I try not to get too caught up in the "faster, I gotta have it" craze, but sometimes I can't help myself.

When I get tired of the KT133A board I'm using now, I have an MSI K7T266 Pro2 board with 512mb of PC2100 just waiting in the wings.

The moral of my story? Damned if I know. I guess I'm just trying to say that maybe you should be happy with something that's a little less than state-of-the-art, because as we all know, anything you have today that matches that description won't match it tomorrow. :D

A guy could go nuts trying to keep up, ya know?

[nightowl]

I just upgraded to a VC11 MB.IT sports the socket 478 P4 CPU
Intel 845 Chipset
400MHz data bBus
And a 300 w. ATX power supply ,Which has the three power connections to the MB to support the Processor . I put the pent.1.5 cpu . All at a cost of about $388.00 which included HD. and other items:D