Upgrade advice needed...

In article , Mark_Venture
wrote:

Hi,

About two months ago, I upgraded my primary PC from my trusty old Abit
BX6r2 board with P3-700Mhz (100fsb), 512Meg(pc100) ram, etc.. To an
Asus P4PE/Lan/1394/Sata board with p4-2.66Ghz(533fsb) with
512Meg(pc2700) memory and I love it!!

But now, my secondary PC's mother board (p3-600(100fsb), 512meg(pc100)
memory) just died. Since I need to buy a mother board, and can not
find a decent priced SLOT1 P3 board that has a bios setting for "power
on after AC loss." I figure its time to upgrade it too.

My choices are to either...

1. upgrade the secondary machine with the same P4PE/p4-2.66/512 combo
and make it exactly like the primary machine,

or
2. move my P4PE/P4-2.66/512 into the secondary machine, and upgrade
the primary again...

I found the following approximate prices.... but I am not sure the
best "bang for the buck"

P4PE/P4-2.66Ghz(533FSB)/Crucial/Micron 512PC2700 for $388.
P4PE/P4-2.8Ghz(533FSB)/ Cricial/Micron 512PC2700 for $451.
P4P800 Deluxe/P4-2.6Ghz(800FSB)/Kingson HyperX 512PC3200 for $484.
P4P800 Deluxe/P4-2.8Ghz(800FSB)/Kingston HyperX 512PC3200 for $560.
(all prices did not include shipping)

On the primary machine I play some games, capture/edit video,
create/edit multi track audio, surf the web, email, word processing,
IM, etc...

The secondary machine is used for a couple of things... My answering
machine/fax machine (Talkworks pro with USR Sportster Voice modem),
FTP Server, its my network's file server, and is used to learn/play
with software (through my company I have access to MS products and
Betas, as well as IBM/Lotus stuff, so I am running a Domino R6 server
for Web/mail since we use Notes/Domino for work).

The $388 better fits my budget, but $451 and $484 are not too far out
of reach. I think $560 would be stretching money just a little
thinner than I'd like to, unless it would mean a major performance
difference (like greater than 10 or 15%)

So, what do you think?

Why not look on Ebay for a P2B-xx family motherboard for your secondary
machine ? They have a "AC PWR Loss Restart" in the BIOS. You could
reuse the hardware that plugs into your old machine. Just do a search
on Ebay for "P2B".

As for your other choices, they are all in the same performance
"ballpark". The dual channel P4P800 has room for four DIMMs instead
of the practical two the P4PE takes. So, if you don't need more than
2x512MB of memory, the P4PE would work fine. The processor with
800FSB has more potential memory bandwidth, but if the applications
you use don't need the bandwidth, that won't be much of an advantage.
In fact, the P4PE can even take a FSB800 processor, but it only likes
to run one DIMM at DDR400 rates (Asus has a webpage about this):

http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/fsb800.htm

Check the review sites, like Anandtech or Tomshardware, for reviews
on the 875/865 chipset, to see what kind of performance they can
achieve. The following are all at roughly 3GHz:

P4C800 432FPS quake, P4P800 430FPS quake, P4PE 364FPS quake
(640x480 size helps remove the video card as the limit)

http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherb.../i875p-23.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherb...65_PAT-12.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherb...45gepe-25.html

Other performance areas are harder to compare, as different apps
were used in each review. Many tests are CPU core clock rate limited,
so all 3GHz processors would be the same. That is the advantage of
good L1/L2 cacheing, it helps remove the memory subsystem from the
picture.

HTH,
Paul