Hmmmm so i came to this brilliant conclusion today. That i need more harddrive space, and that my harddrives are the bottleneck of my current system. Current system is as follows:

- Antec Sonata case with Antec 380w power and an extra 120mm fan
- amd athlon xp2500 (1.8ghz, overclocked to maybe 2.1ghz)
- Some sort of neat cooling for it (thermaltake)
- 1024mb kingstong hyper-x pc3200 (2x512 dual channel)
- radeon 9800 pro 128mb
- chaintech sound w/optical out
- 80gb pata western digital (primary)
- 200gb pata seagate (secondary)
- 60gb pata maxtor (connected thru pci bus 33mhz)
- LG dvd-rw
- LG dvd-rom
and i think thats everything.

I've concluded it'd be smart to go to sata drives, which would allow me to add probably 3 more drives (heck of a lot faster) and connect my old 60gb drive maybe thru a pata-sata converter for the time being.

Now, doing the above will involve getting a new motherboard, which isn't so bad. I could upgrade the board and have options of getting a better processor (i dun really know whats what with new processors anymore - but i'd like to stay AMD).

So, now i need some help, i haven't researched boards in a long time, nor have i looked at processors in a while. I'm looking for a board that'll with serial ata, an agp (don't wanna upgrade the video card yet), some regular pci slots and preferably some pci express slots for the future (unless pci express is backwards compatible with pci - not totally up to date on the pci express either).

I'm not sure if boards include pci express an agp, slots or if it's all one or the other, but hopefully y'all smart people can help out. Likewise whats new out for processors, i'm not out to spend an arm and a leg. I thought my athlon 2500+ would be upgradable, but now they've changed socket types - damn them.

Sorta the only reason i'm doing this, is cause my bro needs a new pc, and i figure if i get a new board and cpu, i can give him my old board and cpu, install them into his currenlt or my old case, along with the 512 ocz w/copper heat er pc3200 (2x256 dual channel) memory i just upgraded from. He could pay me monthly payments, instead of dell or another big company...and all he'd really have to buy would be an 8x video card (as i don't wanna give mine up). He's got a monitor, decent harddrive, recently upgraded and a cdrw (cheap if he wants to buy a new one anyways).


Thats pretty well everything, i could research this all myself, but i'm sure some of you have been keeping up to date on all this jibberish and can give me some simple straight answers and suggestions here allowing me to continue being lazy until i have a decent idea of where i'm going with this. Then i can figure out what fits my price, or what i'll have to pay to get this all done.


****edit****

hmm well after some research and help from some people, i've kinda got things narrowed down to something along the lines of one of the DFI motherboards, an athlon 64 3000+ venice, and eVGA 6600GT video.

Didn't want to have to upgrade video, but i guess i will have to. Either way, saves the bro from having ot buy a video card. Looking to cst abotu $600-$650 depending on exactly which mobo i go with and what kinda shopping i can do for the best prices.

[ May 06, 2005, 03:13 PM: Message edited by: Hardcore Rock Superstar ]

 

HRm... just wondering what makes you think you need SATA drives.

From what I've heard they aren't really any faster than IDE drives right now and if you need to add extra drives there are a couple of ways you can do it with IDE.

So far the only benefit to SATA seems to be the smaller cables for improved airflow.

Just curious though, it's been a while since I've bought a new PC in pieces so I'm a little rusty

 

Sata....a lil bit the speed and a lil bit the expansion. Improved airflow would definitely be nice as well.

ButI think the way my drives are setup is the bottleneck. I like the fact i could connect 8 ide devices directly to the motherboard instead of going thru a pci bus....which hmm i guess is no slower really than directly thru an IDE channel.


OK, so....so speed may be a minimal improvement, btu everything else you named was hot! Plus, it kinda seems like a good time to upgrade (giving some stuff to my bro), i'd like to have a faster CPU (preferably unlocked and overl****able). Wouldn't mind having th option of raid eventhough it doesnt help the lack of room i have.

 

i got a sata drive in mine price difference wasn't huge so i went for it
as in the pciexpress i'd go for it

 

Usually SATA hd's are $1 more then ide's but it depends on where you shop.

I wouldn't really get sata because you don't need more speed you just need more room. I would just get 2 more 200 gb hd's and throw them in.

I would love to know how your running dual channel with a AMD mobo that has to be like 1 year old atleast.


I would just get what you think is good and thats compaible. Like getting dual channel memory for a board that doesn't support it doesn't give you any extra performance.

Those A64 3000+'s are nice. DFI are good mobo's.

 

Hmm thought about just getting another harddrive, again, but now this whole idea of a faster processor and new mobo, with more overclocking features sounds neater and neater.

As for the motherboard supporting dual channel memory, i believe i went thru a big debate with someone on this forum abotu this a bit back heh. To settle that, view page 4 of this pdf file: http://81.169.156.245/soltek.de/solt...5FRN2-hard.pdf

None the less, now i'll debate upgrading the mobo/cpu/video and then grabbing another hd or two when the time comes, or just grabbing another harddrive now and running it off a controller card [img]smile.gif[/img]

 

Well I know there is dual memory support but I didn't think it was here until socket 939 was released.

If you need a new comp, I would upgrade and get like 2 400 GB hd's or something (about $400 each). I would go with as new as AMD64 I could. It's cheaper to get another controler card and another harddrive. Up to you really. I would upgrade if I had the cash to spare.

 

mmmm sata *drool* lol worth the money IMO

 

At work, I use linux and there is a command called hdparam which is a builtin benchmark tool for hd's. It shows you the read speed of the harddrive. A New 7200 rpm ata harddrive gets about 45 Mb/sec, a 7200 Sata gets about 65 mb/sec, a WD Raptor gets about 72 Mb/sec and a scsi gets about 130 mb/sec.