Upgrade questions

[Steel Chicken]

OK guys, looking at doing an upgrade.
Heres my current system:

MSI KT3-Ultra-Aru
Barton 2500 @ 2.08Ghz (chip has more room, but this is boards limit)
1.0GB of 133mhz memory at relaxed timings (running @166Mhz)
ATI 9800-Pro (no O/C yet)
2X100GB IDE drives in RAID mirror (this setup has been giving me corruption issues)

Heres what im looking to upgrade too:
NFI LanParty II-B (should get more OC out of the Barton)
2X512MB Corsair XMS PC3200-LLPRO (the LOW latency versions)
2X160GB Segate SATA drives, plan on putting them in striping for more peformance.

All these goodies run $700 from the egg.
Is this a worthy upgrade? Has to be an XP solution as I got a good unlocked Barton. I dont want to spend the uber cash on the FX's, and the 64's are nice but not that much better per price.

Am I better off with faster RAM (like 450 or 500mhz) with slower latencies? Some of these Mobos can goto 250mhz, and I dont want my uber-expensive memory to be a bottleneck.

Note, I only will do FSB overclocking if I can get AGP and PCI locks, I hate HD corruption.

Comments, suggestions things I have missed?
Thanks.

 

[Koslov]

You might want to consider the newly released AMD64 3400+
and wait for Nvidia Nforce 250 chipset that is supposed to have AGP/PCI lock (should be released this month)

 

[Steel Chicken]

Well the 3400 is around $440 right now...which adds quite a bit more to the budget. Yeah theres a performance increase, but to go from $700 to about $1100 when it wont get me much out of it doesn't seem worth it.

Oh, and I thought the DFII-B has AGP/PCI lock? According to the review done here @ the OCP? IOTW, you could run the CPU/Memory up to 300Mhz, and AGP (seperately from 66 - 100mhz)?

 

[DaveX]

Originally posted by Steel Chicken
Oh, and I thought the DFII-B has AGP/PCI lock? According to the review done here @ the OCP? IOTW, you could run the CPU/Memory up to 300Mhz, and AGP (seperately from 66 - 100mhz)?

It does have an AGP/PCI lock. Koslov was referring to the nForce250 coming out for the A64.

I'd suggest you get some low latency slower ram. You have an unlocked chip so you don't have to increase the FSB to like 250mhz, you can just increase the multi. However, I do believe that laxer timings on faster ram beats tighter timings on slower ram on the Athlon XP??

 

[Steel Chicken]

So you would reccomend higher PC-rated memory, and with longer latencies to save some bucks?