Is this worth the trouble?

[bananaman]

Hello everyone.
This is my first post here.My current system has:
Windows XP Pro
PIII 933
Soyo 6VBA 133
256MB cas3 SDRAM
13 GB Maxtor HD 512KB cache

I was thinking of going to :
Soyo 7VDA
PC2100 DDR
WD 8MB cache HD
Keeping my PIII 933

Would I get enough of a performance increase to justify this or should I save my money?

Thanks in advance.
Bill

[bushmaster]

HUH ? Is what worth the trouble.

[NDD]

Welcome to SysOpt !

Great first post, I must say

The answer is "YES"

[bananaman]

Thanks ND that was super fast.

Although that was my first post I've been wayching from the sidelines and respect your opinion.

Bill

[bushmaster]

sorry only half your post loaded when I read it 1st
this is what I saw.

Hello everyone.
This is my first post here.My current system has:
Windows XP Pro
PIII 933

[NDD]

Sorry bananaman but my first reply was a joke, considering the way your post looked at the beginning

After the post has been edited, my answer would be exactly the opposite

Pentium III processor will NOT take an advantage of the DDR memory, coz it's limited by the FSB to ~1GB/s bandwitdh. So the difference between current PC133 and PC2100 will be very little, if any.
New HD will be nice of coz, but it won't speed your gaming, if that's was the point of upgrade.

Sorry again for the misleading

[Giblet Plus!]

Until now I didn't know there were DDR P3 motherboards!

I would suggest getting a nice new athlon XP processor, Via kt333 motherboard and pc2700 DDR if you're looking for a relatively inexpensive (<$250) upgrade.

[bananaman]

Thanks guys

I had my doubts if any increse in performance would be noticable. I will save my money and invest in a totall upgrade when I get my income tax return.
Bill

[Surreal]

If you can tell us what you want to use the PC for it might help us recommend appropriate upgrades - horses for courses.

New HDD with 8mb cache is going to mean things load faster, but once they are loaded unless your out of ram you won't notice much of a speed difference.

More RAM (ie. 512 instead of 256) will mean you can run more stuff at once and switching between apps won't be as nasty. Again unlikely to increase the speed in which things run.

A new graphics card may help to increase 3d game performance, depending on what you have at the moment. No point upgrading the ram/cpu/hdd if your graphics card is already holding your existing system back.
I've got an Athlon 1600+ with 256mb DDR and a Geforce 2 MX-200. Needless to say the bottle neck is the GF2. I'll be upgrading the graphics card before I touch the cpu mobo or ram.

I would recommend getting the new hdd now, because it will give you more space and will eleviate some frustration waiting for stuff to load (like windows). You can use this in your new system as well of course. You won't have to worry about what kind of ram, cpu, mobo you buy the hdd will work with it.

[bananaman]

Thanks to everyone who helped

Since I won't be spending money on a motherboard and ram I'll probably spend some it to go with a scsi card and hard drive. I'll probably go with the LSI card.Whats the best bang for my bucks in scsi hard drives?
Bill

[NDD]

Seagate SCSI are worth to check, especially the 10k models ...

[deadkenny]

Above and beyond the previous comments regarding PIII's and DDR (which were dead on), I would question any significant 'upgrade' to a socket 370 system. At a minimum, you'd want to get a board that supports Tualatin chips, since there are still Tualatin based Celerons around, up to 1.4GHz, that are reasonable. However, a system based on a low end AthlonXP and PC2100 DDR would be a far better choice. Rather than getting into SCSI at this point, I would suggest that you save towards a future system upgrade. Get a board that supports SATA, and you'll have that option for future upgrades.