Upgrade time...

[Liquid Snake]

I was wondering if I should upgrade my current system. I had replaced the video card and sound card recently (with a Radeon 7500 and a Santa Cruz). They probably won't be upgraded for a while, unless Parhelia appears sometime soon I currently have a Slot1 P3-750 on an Abit BE6-II mobo. Originally, I was planning to upgrade to a dual Athlon MP system, but decided against it since I don't have a lot to devote to this, and I have no experience with SMP systems and very little with AMD systems. I figured I might as well wait for AMD to release the Sledgehammer if I can't spend too much time on this now.

So my question is, would it be worth it to get a new CPU, such as a faster P3, along with a S370 to Slot1 adapter in the meantime? Such an upgrade would go pretty smoothly and I could manage it in less than a day. I have the 1.1 revision (I think) of the BE6-II, which according to Abit doesn't support the Tualitin, so I'm not sure if this is really a good idea.

Here's my current system if anyone is interested:

Intel P3-750, Abit BE6-II, Crucial 7E PC133 384MB (128MBx3), Quantum Fireball KA Plus 18.2GB, IBM 60GXP 20GB, Promise Ultra66, Pioneer DVD-105S, Plextor Plexwriter 8/4/32, Linksys LNE100TX NIC, ATI Radeon 7500, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, Sony 19" 400PS, Addtronics 7890A w/ PC Power & Cooling 450W Turbo-Cool PS

[Wombat]

What OS are you running? You may benefit yourself most by just getting a bit more RAM and putting the rest off. That MB may not make it much longer, so save your pennies for a full system change.

Myself, I'm waiting for the Thorobreds(sp?) to hit so that the prices of everything drop. Then I'll probably get a new CPU.

[G200 PSYCHOMAN]

What exactly do you use your system for?

[Liquid Snake]

Hmm let's see. On weekdays it's the usual stuff like browsing, word processing etc. Also some image editing, though nothing advanced. I have to scan drawings for my friend, clean them up and send them to him, so no advanced Photoshop effects are used. Images are usually around 30MB so I don't think the RAM is a problem. Gaming on weekends and whenever I have time. I figured that a CPU upgrade probably wouldn't be worth it, as the fastest P3 I can get in here is a 1GHz, not that much faster. 133MHz doesn't work reliably on most BX boards (there's no 1/3 AGP divider). So I guess I'll hold off for now and just get a new HD, since I am running out of space.

[Wombat]

You still haven't said which OS you're running.

[Liquid Snake]

I knew I forgot something. I'm running Win2K, so SMP support shouldn't be a problem.

[Wombat]

I wasn't thinking about SMP. Win2K may very well notice the difference between 384MB and 512MB. XP definitely will.

[GNEP]

I concur. Win2k seems to like its RAM - 512Mb seems about right for me. Also a (relatively) cheap upgrade for the extra performance. And 30Mb images in Photoshop would definitely appreciate it, beleive it or not, especially with a lot of layers.

gnep

[Guru]

512 is to be considerd a minimum when working with Photoshop 6 in w2k! If I were you I wold dump any plans on upgrading the CPU on that mobo better save up some money and go for a new mobo and cpu and ram!

[Liquid Snake]

Well Greebe almost convinced me to get a P4 rig in the future instead of a dual Athlon MP system. I'll decide when the time comes to upgrade. The current mobo and CPU will stay as is.

As I said, I'm not really doing heavy Photoshop work, so I wouldn't benefit much from the extra RAM. But since RAM is so cheap these days, hell, why not?