fred said:
You'll like the improvement too
Don't spend TOO much money though, the BX chipset is getting just a
little bit old now. A cpu, motherboard, and one 512M stick of ram
will give you a lot more performance for the added money.
CPU upgrades are still worthwhile - especially if your P2B can handle a
Tualeron @ 133MHZ FSB - but if you're looking at more than about $50 a
complete replacement may be a better investment. The P2B systems I've
built recently cost under $30 (for the CPU) - the remaining components
were rescued from dumpsters.
There are athlon/nforce2 combo's that work great and are at close out
prices now.
My P2b still works, but it's my second box now, and it's starting to
have issues like DVD burners not liking the dma33.
Works just as well as the big boys on the light stuff though.
Plain P2Bs are getting a bit long in the tooth, but I don't see any
reason to replace my P2B-DS Dual P3-S 1.4Ghz systems anytime soon as
they remain more than adequate for my needs, and run XP Pro even better
than they did NT4 - although sometimes it's tempting given the silly
prices the P3-S CPUs are fetching on eBay!
My home file server has a P2B-S, Tualeron 1A @ 1.33Ghz, 4-channel U160
SCSI RAID controller, and 250GB of RAID 5. It has no problem saturating
the 100Mbps network, in fact I'm planning to add another NIC to
alleviate the network bottleneck. The SCSI drives weren't cheap, but the
P2B-based server still cost a lot less than a new SATA RAID server with
equivalent capacity and performance.
I've been running P2B systems exclusively since 1997, and haven't had a
motherboard fail yet - I wonder if my spares will ever be needed...
P2B
