lamba said:
Ok here is what I am thinking of buying Friday.
Motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157115
If they still have this motherboard then.
Cpu:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819112234
Ram:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161675
Will this be budget upgrade for me? I would like to get another 1 GB
ram in the near future.
Thank you in advance,
Laurie
It will be budget, but it will perform about the same as your old system.
Your old processor was 2.8GHz, supporting Hyperthreading. The new processor
is 3.06GHz Celeron, which lacks Hyperthreading, and usually the cache is less
than an equivalent P4 (equivalent in this case, would be comparing it to a
P4 Prescott with 1MB cache), which makes a slight difference. So the new processor
is in the same ballpatk, but my guess would be, slightly slower for some
things.
Asrock is the "king of tricks" when it comes to motherboards. Yes, the
motherboard is fine for your stated purpose.
The fun comes, when considering upgrades to your system, at a future date.
1) The PCI Express slot is x16 in size, but is only wired with x4 lanes.
See the Asrock manual, section 1.4, for a list of approved video cards
known to work in such a slot. That reduces the performance of the PCI
Express video slot, compared to a normal PCI Express motherboard with
true x16 wiring.
http://www.via.com.tw/en/downloads/presentations/chipsets/p4-series/p4-series_comparison.pdf
ftp://download.asrock.com/manual/4CoreDual-SATA2.pdf
2) We're not sure about the memory slots. Yes, there are four DIMM slots.
Two are for DDR (2.5 volt) memory. Two are for DDR2 (1.8V) memory. But
the memory does not operate in 128 bit mode (what everyone else calls dual
channel). I think that VIA's lawyers consider it fair game to refer to
two, independent memory channels, as "dual channel".
In any case, you can only use a maximum of two of the four slots at a
time. A maximum of two DDR memory sticks can be installed or a maximum of
two DDR2 memory sticks can be installed, but not all four slots can be
occupied at the same time.
About the only way to verify the "lawyer style" specification, would
be for someone to benchmark with one or two sticks of memory present,
to see if it functions in 128 bit mode.
So, yes, the motherboard is fine for your usage. The surprises may come
later, if you want to upgrade the system further. I'm not saying it is a
bad product. To judge that, all you have to go on, is previous customer
reviews for the product and the product's predecessor.
It is just I am not in favor of "tricks" or "lawyer style" specifications.
A manufacturer should be able to be honest (i.e. two single channel memory
channels, one for DDR and one for DDR2, one PCI Express x4 video slot),
as otherwise they'll get a reputation for being a "snake". Notice, now,
that when I analyse their products, I always assume the worst, because of
their "lawyer-talk".
For your choice in memory, read the customer reviews in the Newegg
page, to get some idea as to what to expect. With that product, as
soon as the computer is assembled, your Windows repair or clean
install is finished, I would run Orthos to verify everything is OK.
Memtest86+ is a good thing to run from a floppy, first, before booting
into Windows, but you'll also need to test with Orthos, as it tests
in a more stressful way than memtest86+ does. Orthos should run for
hours, without stopping or reporting an error.
http://www.memtest.org (
http://www.memtest.org/download/1.70/memtest86+-1.70.floppy.zip )
http://sp2004.fre3.com/beta/beta2.htm
Good luck,
Paul
