Not sure what CPU I can get

I want to upgrade my CPU and RAM but my motherboard is a little out of date

K7 Triton GA-7N400-L nforce2 Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 1.24 GHz
2 x 512 333 DDR

It does pretty much what I want it to do and I can't really afford to start from scratch so I'm hoping I can still get what I need. I can't make sense of the manual though so I can't figure what the limit is for what I can have. The manual says 1.4 or higher but doesn't say the maximum. I'm sure that was because 2 years ago the highest power CPUs were within what it could handle. I think these could take up to 3 GHz but I'm really not sure looking at the manual. Any ideas?

 

Here you go...

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/...erboard&ProductID=1673&ProductName=GA-7N400-L

 

Looks like you can use any socket A CPU (you might need to update the BIOS to achieve all socket A CPU support)
Ram, you want to match the FSB of the CPU you choose, so if use a CPU that has FSB of 333 your existing memory is fine.

Another note, if you upgrade Memory avoid CL 3 memory, NF2 MOBOs dont like CL 3, Most Value Memory is CL 3

 

Ok thats helped a lot, thanks.

Thats kinda weird though because my CPU doesnt seem to match my current RAM going by that list. I can't actually see any there that I could say for definite are my CPU; it's definitely an Athlon XP and in properties it says its 1.24 GHz. All the ones anywhere close to that look to be 266. Is it possible to run a 266 processor with 333 RAM?

 

Yes, you can run your FSB and RAM asynchronously, but you get the best performance when running them both at the same speed.