MOBO too old?

[randallfitz]

i have an older gateway with an AMD athlon 850 CPU. the 20Gig HD crapped out, so i ordered a 40 Gig 7200 replacement. then i found out my mobo has 200 MHz FSB, 100 clock speed, 2x AGP, and so on. will new vid cards and lots of RAM even work well? or should i start from scratch?

[sdkfz]

RAM - every motherboard has a limit on how much ram it will take, the newer the bigger the number. I am sure gateway (or crucial) will tell you the limit pretty quick and then the question is this enough for what you want to do?

Video Card - as long as the new card can be installed in a 2x AGP port then you are ok. granted, the band width at 2x is less then 4 or 8x but the new card i am looking at, the ATI Radeon 9600 Pro will work in a 2x slot and that is a reasonable card (not great but it will run half life 2)

Now as to scratch - well you can put together a pretty good system for 500 plus video card and monitor. This assumes no fancy cases, just better quality guts. Since some video cards go for 500 dollars I leave the card choice to you as this is a pretty big swing of options from a 15.00 old tnt2 card to the latest and greatest 500. The old monitor would still perform as a cost cutting measure. Still you are looking at 750 to 1000 for a definite upgrade from where you are, but you are not talking about bleeding edge performance at this price. Upgrading the current system to something new is probably going to be a difficult exercise given the proprietary parts in any name brand. If you search the site here you will find many who have asked the same question.

Going back to what do you want to do with the computer, if you are a light to medium gamer who can not spend the bucks to get a whole new machine right now... do the card and ram for about 250-300 total. If you are careful with the card decision you should be able to take it with you to the new build down the road. Adding Ram to lower amount of RAM is always the best way to see immediate improvement, just make sure that you either are prepared to tweak the BIOS if you go over what 98/ME can use as far as RAM goes.

Good luck