upgrading to dual core system

[DrNick]

Hello,

I currently have an MSI via-based board with a 2800+ xp athlon and I'm
thinking of moving to a cost-effective dual core board. I have an AGP
6800XT card that I'd rather not throw away and 1.5 gigs of ddr ram
which should be 3200. I'm running windows XP pro sp2.

I'm looking at this ASRock 775Dual-VSTA board which would let me keep
both my ram and my video card. It has a PCIe slot but it looks like
its 4x which is someting of a bottleneck for future video card
expansion. Any other limitations on this board anyone knows of? I'm
going to pair it with a duo core 2 E4300.

Hardware-wise I think this plan is looking pretty good for the money
but I'm concernd how well windows is going to handle a move from an
athlon/via environment to an intel/via environment. Last time I moved
this installtion it was from a t-bird to an athlon and all I did was
was delete the drivers, chipset, etc. Will I be okay doign this this
time around or will I have to do an in-place 'repair' install? Any
caveats?

Also, are there any other AGP and PCIe boards out there? I'm not able
to find any others. Ideally, I'd like something with a PCIe x16 slot
on there as well as AGP. Thanks.

DrNick

 

[John Doe]

Hello,

I currently have an MSI via-based board with a 2800+ xp athlon and
I'm thinking of moving to a cost-effective dual core board. I
have an AGP 6800XT card that I'd rather not throw away

Maybe you can find someone to sell/give it to. In my opinion, it's a
little late in the game (if you run current games) to be hanging on
to an AGP based mainboard. But if you do, be sure any necessary
adapters are available.

and 1.5 gigs of ddr ram which should be 3200.

If its PC3200, socket 939 mainboards use PC3200 memory too.

I'm running windows XP pro sp2.

I'm concernd how well windows is going to handle a move from an
athlon/via environment to an intel/via environment. Last time I
moved this installtion it was from a t-bird to an athlon and all I
did was was delete the drivers, chipset, etc. Will I be okay
doign this this time around or will I have to do an in-place
'repair' install? Any caveats?

A clean reinstall is recommended.

Drop everything and make a removable media copy of important files
from your hard drive if you don't already have that.

Good luck and have fun.

 

[Trimble Bracegirdle]

I think that Asrock is the only AGP / PCI-E ...DDR PC3200 ..sckt 775.
Around but look and think carefully ...I abandoned this route for a complete
new machine.
Note those RAM slots it will only take 2 sticks of ITHER DDR1 OR DDR2
....your 1.5 gigs is in 4 sticks yes ??.

That route essentially goes no-place ..all one does is get a new processor.
& a lot of Aggravation.
And what about your PSU ? can it do this Intel type p4 ..
u know with the extra 2nd 4 pin power plug into the middle of the M.Board ?

I would take a bet that you forget this route ..
Use the older machine complete as a 2nd & for backups.
OR upgrade what you have ...better graphics card maybe ..there is good value
Geforce 7600 GT AGP (NOT the GS)..
Mouse
@@@

 

[DaveW]

With the change in motherboard chipset, if you want to avoid nasty Registry
errors and data corruption, you must reformat the harddrive and do a fresh
install of the OS. You can skip this step if you wish, but I hope you have
lots of time on your hands for the resulting difficulties...