Finding out what MOBO I have

[ob1knabe]

I bought a computer off of ebay 2 years ago. I know it has a AMD K6 450 processor. What I'm wanting to do is find out what motherboard I have to see if I can put in a faster processor. I've never tried to build my own computer or anything, but would like to do this on my own. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[HAL9000]

If you can put a faster processor in, the fastest you're going to be able to go is a K6 (2? 3?) 550Mhz which IMHO, won't be worth it as you won't notice any big speed increase.

[glc]

No matter what board you have, 550 is as fast as it will go, you would not really notice the difference. Pause the initial boot screen and copy down the bios string numbers from the lower left of the screen and we may be able to figure out what the board is.

[Cricket]

Hi ob1knabe,

Welcome to PC Mech.

At best, the most you could upgrade a Socket 7 (or Super 7) motherboard is to a 550MHz CPU...not much of an upgrade actually. To really see a difference, you normally have to double your current CPU speed when deciding to do an upgrade. You can easily triple your CPU speed if you choose one of the current CPU's (AMD Athlon XP or INTEL P4).

Your best option would be to upgrade the motherboard, CPU and RAM (and maybe the video card) to something more current.

Figure out how much you want to spend and what parts you think you can use from the old system (floppy, hard drive, sound card, CD-ROM, etc...).

Building your own PC is not that hard, but you do have to do some homework to be sure your part selection is good.

And you can ask all the questions you want here about putting computers together, they'll be answered by some very knowledgeable members.

Cricket

[ob1knabe]

Thanks for the info. I was wanting to upgrade to 1.0 GHZ processor and 256 RAM, and keep my dvd rom, cd-rw, zip drive, and floppy drive. I also have Creative SB live Value sound card, ATI rage fury 128 video card, and 128 MB of ram. I would appreciate any recommendations on what I need to get to upgrade my computer. Currently I'm using windows 98. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[Cricket]

Hi ob1knabe,

You'll need a new motherboard, CPU, heatsink, RAM (depending on the type the motherboard supports...currently, most motherboards now support DDR RAM) and power supply (at least a good quality 300 watt PSU).

You can re-use the SB Live! Value, floppy, Zip drive, CD-RW and DVD. I would upgrade the video card to something current.

You might also consider upgrading to at least a 1.5GHz or faster CPU. The prices now are very reasonable for the speed grades available (except for the very fastest ones). A 1GHz is okay, but since you're upgrading you might as well try to make your PC a little more "future-proof".

What do you do with your PC anyway? That will decide how fast a CPU you should consider.

Think about whether you want to go with a AMD or INTEL based system so we can recommend motherboards. Doesn't matter which one you choose, they're both great CPU's.

Cricket

[ob1knabe]

Thanks Cricket you've been a big help. I've always used an AMD processor and never had any problems, so I'd probably stay with that. I use the computer for internet, multimedia (avi, mpg), picture editing with my digital camera, and gaming. It would be a HUGE help if you could recommend a motherboard, and processor. This may be a stupid question, but can I use the case I have? I have know idea what brand it is, and there is nothing on the case saying what it is. Thanks in advance.

[Jenni]

You are probably not gonna be able to use your current case. There were some ATX socket 7 boards though, so you'll have to check to make sure about yours. ATX motherboards have all the connectors in a row down the right side of the case. Also, does your case have a push in, it's on, push again, it's off power switch, or is the power switch more like the reset button, barely touch it and it's on/off?

Also, you need to check your cards and make sure none of them are ISA as ISA slots are rare on the new motherboards.

[glc]

It would be best to replace the case with one that has a quality 300 watt power supply to be compatible with today's fast (and power hungry) processors. The Enlight 7237 is a very good reasonably priced case. Figure on getting all new DDR ram, standard PC100 sdram is too slow for today's processors. The Rage 128 is not capable of running today's games well, you should look at getting an ATI Radeon or Nvidia GeForce-based card. I'm an Intel guy and am not a gamer, so I will leave specific motherboard and video card recommendations to others. You might also plan on getting a new 7200 rpm hard drive unless you already have a decent sized and fast drive to reuse.

[Orcmonkey]

Just a rough reccomendation:

Enlight 7237 with 300w PSU $44
ABIT KX7-333 Mobo-$95
AMD ATHLON XP 2000+ RETAIL- $160
256 MB Kingston 2700 DDR Ram- $74
40 GB Maxtor 7200RPM HDD- $69
PNY Geforce 4 4200- $165
Re-use DVD, CDRW, Floppy/zip and sound

Total- $607

All prices are from www.newegg.com

[Jenni]

If you aren't a serious gamer, which you must not be to still be using that old computer, lol, you might look into one of the nForce motherboards with the onboard Geforce2.