General upgrade questions

[lucky]

It's been 3 years since I built my machine. Any answers would be
appreciated in whole or part. FYI I'm looking for a new Asus board/ram
and around 2.0 cpu give or take. I will keep my 20 gig and various other
hard drives, my Cdrw, video card, modem, but can give up my ISA sound
card for on board sound.

1. Will win98SE run ok on the newer asus boards?

2. My all in wonder radeon owner's manual said it runs in a 2x/4x slot.
Will I have problems with 8x slots accepting my dinosaur? I read
different things about voltages but can't find any volt stuff in my
manual.

3. Regarding all these new types of ram, one general question: is the
difference between 128 and say, 512 of ddram just as big of a difference
as it was for my PC100? I realize I must buy the new stuff, but since
it's so much more expensive now, I know I can't just go out and buy 512
of 2700 ram for instance.

if you can think of any other pitfalls, please post them. I'm just a bit
tired of my old 433 celery chip

 

[Ancra]

It's been 3 years since I built my machine. Any answers would be
appreciated in whole or part. FYI I'm looking for a new Asus board/ram
and around 2.0 cpu give or take. I will keep my 20 gig and various other
hard drives, my Cdrw, video card, modem, but can give up my ISA sound
card for on board sound.

1. Will win98SE run ok on the newer asus boards?

I'm almost sure it will (but I actually don't know), but do update it.

2. My all in wonder radeon owner's manual said it runs in a 2x/4x slot.
Will I have problems with 8x slots accepting my dinosaur? I read
different things about voltages but can't find any volt stuff in my
manual.

3. Regarding all these new types of ram, one general question: is the
difference between 128 and say, 512 of ddram just as big of a difference
as it was for my PC100? I realize I must buy the new stuff, but since
it's so much more expensive now, I know I can't just go out and buy 512
of 2700 ram for instance.

Yes, the difference is going to be as big. But you don't necessarily
have to go all the way to 512MB to breathe easy with 98. 128 is simply
to little. It depends on what you're running, but 256 may be quite
tolerable, and 384 should be very comfortable for most.

if you can think of any other pitfalls, please post them. I'm just a bit
tired of my old 433 celery chip

Major pitfall: (P4-core)Celeron.
Don't do another Celeron. The new ones are terribly slow. Check this
out for an illustration:

price comparision:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=2

business winstone2004:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=4

content creation winstone2004:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=5

div x encoding:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=6

3D-rendering:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=7

VisualC++ compile times:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=8

various game benchmarks:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=9
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=10
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=11
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=12
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=13
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=14
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=15
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=16
http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1927&p=17


ancra

 

[lucky]

Major pitfall: (P4-core)Celeron.
Don't do another Celeron. The new ones are terribly slow. Check this
out for an illustration:

looks like amd maybe for me...I don't care about the fastest, just
better than what I have...and also the board should be able to take more
ram and faster chip when I get more $$$

 

[dummy]

You may have problems running Win98 on an Asus A7N8X Nforce2 chipset
motherboard. I think you should seriously consider going with WinXP.
I use the home edition and found it to be a nice operating system.
You may not be able to update Win98 much longer. I think that the
A7N8X is the best Nforce2 chipset motherboard for AMD Processors, but
it has had some reported issues with Win98. Some of the others may
have some comments on this.

I wouldnt buy an SATA hard drive at this point. They will not even
load without a floppy to put the drivers on to make SATA work.
Eventually, they will make SATA the default and not the optional drive
interface.

Normally a 4X video card will run in an 8X AGP Slot.

XP uses a lot of RAM up in a hurry. Many gamers are using 1 gig of
RAM. 512 is the sweetspot for XP. If you are going to use 512 Megs
you may want to get 2 256meg DDR modules so you can operate it in Dual
DDR mode. There will be DDR2 RAM coming out soon. The Memory
manufacturers are already making it. PCI X-Press will be coming out
soon too. I am not so sure there is much difference between DDR266
and DDR400.

http://www.blackviper.com/index.html


Above site is good for WinXP

 

[lucky]

You may have problems running Win98 on an Asus A7N8X Nforce2 chipset
motherboard.

Normally a 4X video card will run in an 8X AGP Slot.

I really don't want to buy a new O/S so maybe I'll just buy an 'older'
new asus board or something. Gotta do more research. Any idea where to
get the win 98 possible issues?