Help! CPU upgrade on ASUS A7V MoBo Recommendations?

[paul441]

I have an older system just sitting in my closet that I'd like to upgrade and use. I was thinking about putting it on my home network, hooked-up to my home theatre. I wouldn't use it for watching movies as I already have a fairly high-end set-up for that. Instead, I was thinking that I would use it to view photos on my 56" DLP, listen to all my iTunes music on my stereo and just surf the net. I am not a gamer at all.

The system has an AMD Athlon 850MHz processor on an ASUS A7V Motherboard. If I wanted to add a new processor, what other AMD's would work? The video and audio cards are still pretty good (digital coax output on the audio) so I don't think I'd do anything with them. I may add another 512MB of RAM to get it up to 1GB, but that's about it.

So... what are my options for a new processor?

Thanks.

[jayb1234]

Which specific A7V board is that? There are several and they use 4 or 5 different chipsets.

[Alfie]

That board only supports cpus with a 200 fsb,you're limited as to what you can put on it.
The next step up on AMD cpus have a fsb of 133(266) and are not supported.
That is if it's the original A7V board.
This is about as high as you can go.
http://www.starmicro.net/detail.aspx?ID=210

[glc]

Paul, go to support.asus.com and choose Support, then CPU Support. Put your exact model in and it will tell you all compatible processors, along with the required bios revision to support them.

Alfie is 100% correct for the original A7V. To me, that processor is not worth a fraction of the price. Run it the way it is, and don't spend a lot on ram either, SDRAM isn't cheap. For the price of that processor and more SDRAM, you could get a complete motherboard, processor, and DDR ram upgrade that would put it to shame, something like a Socket 754 Sempron or Socket 478 Celeron-D. The only gotcha there may be your power supply - just about all new boards need the 4 pin P4 plug now.

Let's see - $148 for a 1400/200 Athlon. $70 for a 512mb PC133 stick. Thats over $200.

Now - $75 for a Sempron 64 2800+. $80 for a gig of DDR. $65 for an Asus K8N.

Do the math, my friend. DOUBLE the speed for the same price, and you will have a decent old motherboard with processor and ram to use for a bench test board or horsetrade for something else you may need.

[paul441]

Thanks guys! As a newbie to this site, I just want to say how great it is to be able to get the help and benefit of experience a relative newbie like myself needs from time-to-time.

Alfie, thanks for the link (to be honest, I probably should have thought of that)

GLC, once again, great advice. I think I will go that route and as you say for a couple hundred bucks I'd be much further ahead. I like the idea of having a functioning bench-tester as well - never thought of that.

Mahalo!