"What should I buy" thread#: 9bajillion?

I did a quick search on this board for "buyer's guide", "buy new", and "new system" and didn't get quite what I was looking for even though I am sure you get threads like this almost every day. I am looking to establish a bit of a dialog regarding the purchase of a new system, or at least the upgrade of an old one. I have some specific questions and concerns and would like to try to coral it all into one place. If this is not the sort of thing for this board, perhaps one of you knows of a good hardware buyer discussion forum where I could go and get some ideas.

In any event, I am going to assume that you LOVE this sort of thing and will ask my questions. I will apologize in advance, for my verbosity - it seems I love the sound of my own keyboard.

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My wife wants to upgrade her system. Her system is primarily used for Graphic Design and MMORPG's with a lot of message board trolling to fill in the gaps. We are looking at a variety of wide-ranging options. She doesn't want "Uber", but she doesn't want crappy, either - we are "bang-for-your-buck" oriented people.

The first option we are looking at is starting with a barebones Soltek system. These tiny little cases help satisfy the cuteness factor that is required. They are nice looking and very quiet. They seem a bit limited in their expandability, though with only two 5.25" bays and few PCI slots, etcetera. Any thoughts on these systems?

This brings us to the dilemna of the motherboard (since those Soltek systems come with one). She definately wants a new CPU, GFX Card and more RAM

(
current stats:
Athlon@1050 MHz,
GeForce4 MX420 64MHz,
512Megs of RAM,
respectively
)

- a new case is very likely, too but we won't worry about that here. We are not sure whether to get a new motherboard, but we expect that will be necessary. Windows reports the motherboard to be a MS-6561 from MSI and Google turns up the following regarding that MoBo:

::Socket A/462 ATX Motherboard
::SiS 745 Chipset
::supports Socket A for AMD Athlon XP or Duron processor up to 1900+ and
::up to 3 GB of high performance DDR DIMM memory
::AGP 4x slot, 5 PCI slots, and a CNR slot.


Upgradeability, or at the very least, some long term usage is a must. So here are my questions:

Motherboard: Is there any sense in keeping the current one? Would buying the *best* processor that it will hold and more RAM just be throwing money away? Should we really be looking at boards with PCI-Express?

Processor: Above 2GHz is there really a noticeable difference for the things she will be using it for, or do those processes (graphic design/gaming) rely more on the RAM/GFX card? Is every extra cycle/second worth the effort?

Graphics Card: AGP or PCI-Express? Does it matter? I have heard some people say that AGP is on it's way out, so to consider the future you must get a PCI-Express slot. Is this true? Also, Radeon or GeForce? Is this personal preference? What about bad models (ie some people say "stay away from the MX series, or whatever). Are there some good rules of thumb? We don't want a $400 card. Something that is "decent" since this is the most easily upgradeable feature for down the road and we don't want to end up spending $1000 on this renovation right at this moment.

That is all for now. If anyone has taken the time to wade through all that - thank-you, I look forward to your comments (and you REALLY ought to get out more ). If this is really not the place for this then any directions to a more suitable forum will be greatly appreciated.

 

It's the right place and I do get out I'v been out all day shopping for computer parts LOL .

The best overall/noticable performance increase will been seen by upgrading the motherboard,a faster cpu in the current board wont be that noticable,a new chipset"motherboard" is the link between all of the components and you want this link to be as fast as possible.Also the present motherboard is only agp x4 so it wont full use of a new video card as they are now all agp x8 or pci-e.At the moment and for the near future agp is as good as pci-e,the difference is that pci-e can handle a faster card or 2 faster cards unless you spend $1000 on 2 video cards you don't really need it,saying that most of the new video cards will be pci-e and the pci-e board have newer faster chipsets that make the overall system faster,but are more expensive.With a new board you will also need some new ram and a new psu so you are basically building a new computer.

IMHO that system is at the end of its upgradable life,especially if your looking for something to get you through the next couple of years.It's hard to point you in the direction of a video card without a budget,but this is the most important component when it comes to gaming,this upgrade will not only increase performance in games but also the visual quality of them.

So really you want to balance all the parts equally and spread the money around,if you could post how much you would like to spend we can easily link you to the best parts within your budget,or give opinions on where best to compromise,without being overly detrimental to the performance increase.

 

Well, I guess to ballpark it I would say something along the lines of $600ish spread among the MoBo, GFX card and CPU. That's Canadian Dollars, but let's throw a +/- of 20% or so, since we really haven't set a budget for it, but we aren't really into spending double for the very highest tier of stuff when the month-old stuff is about half-price (making numbers up here, but you get the general idea). So 500-600 US Dollars would be the equivelant, I guess. She will be going with a Gig of RAM, but I think RAM is pretty straight forward.

I should mention that she likes AMD, but this isn't a hard and fast rule.

 

Do you want to use the drives from the old comp or do you want to leave that in one peice as a backup?

 

She wants to keep her Zip Drive (not sure if that's really needed or not with rapidly improving Flash Drive capacity... thoughts?). As far as spares go we have 3 running machines that are about the same spec's as hers and a couple more that run a *little* bit. So, the short answer is: drives from the old comp for now.

 

Here's my Idea's

Good cheap nf3 ultra mobo

http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813128263

AMD643000 socket 939

http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103501

gig of ram

http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145440

A 6600 gt video card agp x8

http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130220

Neweggs running really slow so I havn't found the best 6600gt ,theres cheaper places than newegg though,I don't know them being from the UK,but it should give you an idea of what to aim for comes to about $500

BTW I meant harddrives so I would have left some money for them,I went slightly on the cheapside anyway,but this can all be bought cheaper if you shop around,newegg's return policies are harsh.

 

Great stuff, thanks! Newegg also doesn't ship to Canada, but you have given me a good starting point. You reminded me of a question I was going to ask about socket patterns - is there a good/bad choice? That is to say is 754 to be avoided for obsolescence reasons? What besides 939 is "up-to-date"?

Also, you raise a good point with the hard drives. I am sure hers are sub-par, but hopefully there won't be a lot of swapping going on with so much RAM. I guess there is always some though and a bad HD will be the bottleneck.

I like what you have put together and the fact that including RAM it is still around the $500 mark. That Vid card has some great reviews, I must admit I was surprised you went with a 128meg card, but I have learned that bigger numbers don't mean anything with video cards. The 256meg "cheapy" cards turn out to be slower than better-built 128's.

Thanks for your help, I will take this knowledge and poke around some more

 

It's not so much the socket but the chipset the cpu is plugged into,all the latest fastest chipsets use the NEW 939 socket,so inevitably the chipset/motherboard is faster improving overall system performance.

there are faster cpu's in the 754 than the a64 3000 939 I linked you to,but they are the same price, and the 754 line has been discontinued,so the money saved in buying a cheaper 754 mobo,are features lost on the new 939's.

 

the new boards make use of SATA,again the main advantage is that the latest/fastest harddrives use it giving you greater upgrade potential,you can also hot swap these drives while they are going,so called without data corruption but I havn't tried it yet with mine.

The size of the memory only comes into play when you start playing incredibly video intensive games "FPS" at very high resolutions,in 32 bit,with high anistropic filtering and antianilising and lots of textures in the 1600 x 1200 range.Companies double the amount of memory because it is cheaper than using expensive faster memory to make you want to buy thier products.

 

Ah ok, that was what I was looking for regarding the sockets. That makes sense about the GFX cards. Her gmaing isn't really fast Shooter style, but nice ambling adventure games. The prime concern is huge Photoshop files. Sounds like quality over quantity wins the race