Help with PC upgrade!!!

 

Hi, I would like to upgrade my brother's old celery 300A computer, so
I'm thinking a Pent 4 mobo and chip and possible memory and case. I
can put it together but I'm not good with specifications.
Please recommend the above items that work together well!!!
 I will be using his hard drives, cd roms, sb live card, video card,
and other items from hic current celery 300A computer, I basically
want to get him going faster. He plays a few games but is mostly
learning to use the Internet and writing, drawing on the computer.
Thanks for everyone's help with this!!!

 



first off...
for what he's going to be doing with the machine...
the celeron 300 is probably good enough...

but if you really want to upgrade but use the old componenets...
then maybe just a current version celeron such as a 2.5ghz would be plenty
good...
it's about $100 less than a p-4 and would certainly perform way better than
the celeron300.

btw: you may also want to consider an AMD processor...they perform well
and are quite reasonably priced

my final suggestion would be to use any mother board *except* PC Chips!

 

says...

You're going to have to change the motherboard, power supply, memory
and video card. The video card will have to go because it'll be an
older 5 volt AGP type and modern boards only support 1.5V and 3.3V
cards. If the HDDs are older than 3 years old then they're seriously
going to hammer the performance.

--
Conor

An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan.
-- George Patton

 

On Fri, 25 Feb 2005 23:34:21 GMT, ByteGuy


You need a new power supply, and a new hard drive might be
one of the most significant performance increases.

P4 CPU is overpriced and a bad value for the described uses,
consider an Athlon 64 or a Sempron for lower cost.  Either
will usually run old software faster than a P4 will at any
cost.  Not only is the hard drive a performance benefit, but
at this age it's a liability, due to fail as it's expected
lifespan has been reached (unless it's been replaced in
recent years).  Same for optical drive.  Essentially, you
can reuse the floppy drive after dusting it out, maybe, and
if the case has VERY atypically-good airflow you might get
away with reusing it too, but the typical, even good Celeron
300-era cases did not have adequate airflow for a modern
build.

As for brands, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI and Abit are good.  Avoid
ECS, PCChips and other off-brands.  Get a name-brand power
supply, not a generic came-free-with-case unit.

As Conor mentioned, you'll need to replace the video card
too, most likely, though for the described uses a modern
integrated video should be plenty fast enough.  Even so,
it's a good idea to get a motherboard with an AGP (else PCI
Express) slot even if it has integrated video, just in case
the video might be upgraded some day.

 

Hi and Thanks,
I see what youo guys mean!! I should have mentioned what he has in the
first post:
In-win or Antec case, 300 p/s ?
BH6 motherboard
Celery 300 O/ced to 464 MHz
512 Mb Memory
Sound Blaster Live
A Supra 64Mb video card
2 Hard Drives 7200 rpm
10/100 nic card
56K modem
1 CD-R and 1 CD roms

He's BROKE, and I go over to his place and play Links Golf, but I
would like to upgrade his computer a little, as I'm not loaded enough
to get him a new computer. I was thinking an AMD chip and motherboard,
and more memory. He doesn't do the internet alot, nor like RPG games.

What I need is motherboard recommendations!
Thanks again!!!