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Trying to avoid another upgrade mistake...

R

rrramsey

Gawd
Joined
Mar 1, 2001
Messages
565
Its time for my far & few-between system upgrade, & I'd like to avoid the mistakes I've made a few times in the past. My biggest complaint is whatever I select is dead within 3 months of me buying it. My first pc was a 486/25 with the darn chip soldered on the system board. Upgrade path = non-existant. Later, I built a socket 7 system (p200) just in time for slot systems to appear & I was left with no upgrade path..there werent any faster chips for me to throw in (p233 wasnt much of an upgrade). I skipped the slot 1 & A boards and jumped into Socket A when it arrived. I built a Duron 800 system and not too much later, they upped the bus from 200 to 266 & all the chips went to that clock speed. Well, no bios upgrade ever appeared for my mobo (a Tyan) to hit that clock speed so I was shut down again. I eventually wound up with a 1gb Athlon in there, since the 1.4gb 200fsb Athlons are scarce & over priced on Ebay.

I know technology moves on, and I dont expect to be able to throw cpus into a system forever, but I'd like to avoid what I've done in the past which is to buy into a platform right at its end.

Which brings me to today: What current platform is going to allow me the longest & best upgrade path? Athlon XP's are cheap but how much longer will Socket A be a player? The socket 754 Athlon 64's are appealing, but are they going to be a dead end by the end of the year due to socket 939/940 (out of my price range, unfortunately). Or will a 775 Pentium 4 be my best bet?
 
Well the AMD 64's will give a lot of life, and Socket 754's are fine. If you go down the Intal path while looking for long-term life, you'll find they will last, but will become redundant as 64-bit programs come out. As for clock speed, well you'll need to say more about what you'll use it for. You can buy a 3000+ and overclock it, if your that way inclined..
As for mobo, I personally reccommend ASUS: choose a model that has everything on it (PCI-Express, SATA etc). This will ensure that you won't get left behind as these technologies mature.
RAM: At least 1GB. You can have dual channel if you want, but it doesn't really matter if you don't.
Vid card: At least a X800XT or 6800. They will give long life out of the system.

Hope this (rough) guide helps.
 
I'm not really concerned bout the vid card, features, or the memory...mostly the platform. I just want to be able to in a years time easily pickup a faster processor and drop it in. I dont want to get the fastest socket 754 processor today and have them never release anything better. If I get a 3700+ today I want there to still be growth potential in the platform so that I could drop in a 4700+ next year. Does that explain better what I'm looking for?
 
The Socket 754s are being put on the back burner now that the socket 939 is out, so if you want a CPU upgrade option in a year's time, get a socket 939 - it's what AMD plans will be its socket for the (foreseeable) future.
 
honestly its just alot of research , and keeping in mind what the best chip to overclock is , which helps alot.

took me about a month to get all of my system parts together.

its about 2 years old now , and well i can play ut2k4 well , and doom3 on medium detail at 800 rez on it. so thats good enough for me.

ill prolly upgrade in half a year or so .
 
If you buy into 775 now and in a few months they go to a 1066MHz cpu won't your mobo still be obsolete? not if you had bought DDR533. but you are going to pay for that gamble.

a 3.8E/478 will be out soon. 4G cpus have hit a wall.

the 754 may become AMDs budget line so it may be around a little longer. probably another two years.

you can't have bleeding edge and lowest prices. the 939 may be your best bet because the dual core 939 cpus should be out within a year's time. But what if they come out with a 939 using DDR2? what then?
 
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