Upgrade or New system

[Shaolin]

G'day all, greets from a new member to the board.
Ok, i'll dive right in here. What i would like to ask is, should i upgrade my present system, or buy a whole new setup?
What i was thinking, was to upgrade my K6-2 300 (stop laughing, its served me well :Þ) to an Athlon 1Gig. Along with the chip i would need a new case and Mobo. The case i have would be fine, but as a PSU is pretty close to the price of a complete case+PSU, i may as well go with the latter

Ok, this christmas i just bought my son his first system, a Duron 650 with TNT2. Having done the right thing and put the system through a rigorous and also traditional christmas test, i began thinking that maybe the Athlon 1gig was just being greedy. The performace with his Duron system on 128mb pc100 was excellent in comparison to mine. Thus i moved on to a new idea. How about a system based on a Duron 800 or perhaps Athlon 800?.
Doing my calculations, i make it that i can have a second full and still a fast system for an extra £200 over an upgrade.
The system will be used more or less for gaming, UT in particular. (Yeah, im fed up of trying to frag these guys on their super quick computers with my K6-2. )
So what do you think guys?. Go all out for the Athlon 1 gig or have a second system for the extra expence?. And is there a huge difference between the Athlon/Duron 800 and Athlon 1gig? Truth is i could use the extra system, but want a good gaming machine too...

Any help/suggestions guys?..

Cheers, Shaolin....

[PeteS99]

Do you have a budget in mind? What kind of video card are you shooting for? If it were me, I'd go Athlon 800 (its not much more than a Duron 800) and spend the extra dough on a sweeeeet vid card. That's me though.

~pete

[Xayd]

I also play UT obsessively, and am running a Duron 650 @ 1008 on an Asus A7V. Personally, I'd go for the Duron. For the price it can't be beat. The 800 should overclock to 900-1000 easily with a decent cpu fan and one or two case fans.

As far as the vid card, that depends. If you're playing pretty much ONLY Unreal for the next few months, and don't mind having to upgrade within the next year on your vid card again, the Voodoo5's are a great deal for under 200 bucks. 3dfx is virtually out of business now, though, so you won't have driver updates after February, and when the Voodoo5 isn't enough you'll have to get something else. I'd say you should get a year's use out of it, though. Unreal engine games are written in Glide, so will always be much faster and look much crisper on a 3dfx card.

Duron 750 or 800, Asus A7V or Abit KT7, Voodoo5, and 128 megs of CAS2 PC133 RAM should run you all of about 400 bucks. Another hundred for your case and a little cooling, and you're in business.

Xayd

[systempat]

You can always get a debate with these questions, but it sounds like you already talked yourself into a new system. By the time you do a Motherboard, CPU, case and PS, that's mostly a new system. I have a feeling you won't be done until you do a new Video card and maybe a HDD too.

Have fun with it! I think the 800 speed would be fine. They just get expensive after that.

---->>> Pat

[Shaolin]

G'day all..

Ok, heres what i've come up with so far......

Duron 800.(I chose the Duron over the Athlon as both are pretty much the same but for the extra cache on the Athlon)
Asus A7V Mobo. (After reading the reviews on this board, it sounds real nice, Especially if you want to overclock. The option it has for CPU increments by 1mhz at a time is pretty damn neat is it not?)
128mb PC133 ram.
20G Maxtor 7200rpm ATA100 or, 30G Maxtor 5400rpm ATA100. Now i havn't made up my mind as to which HD i should go with, so a little input from you guys again would be great. Both are ATA100, Both Maxtor. Do i take the cut in rpm and gain 10G extra space, or sacrifice the space and take the quicker drive? (is there much difference in speed?). Both Drives are almost identical in price.
As for Vid card?. Well, still not settled here yet. Trouble here in the UK, is that were very over priced in most things. For example, Xayd, the components you list for around $400 (Duron 750 or 800, Asus A7V or Abit KT7, Voodoo5, and 128 megs of CAS2 PC133 RAM) would infact cost over $600 here. $423 of that being the Voodoo5500 and the Asus alone. No wonder im still grinding away on a K6-2....... LOL
I'm leaning toward the Voodoo card as the card has been praised well. But whats it really like for gaming on the whole?. Will it handle Non Glide based games just as smooth as other 3D cards. I really only play UT, but religiously. Yet my kids tend to play just about anything out there (including Quake 3. EEEEK!!), and who knows, i may stumble upon my next gaming passion thats not glide. I just want a card that delivers good speeds in whichever area its working in.

BTW, Xayd, do you mind me asking what kind of frame rate your kickin' around in UT with that setup?. I take it your using the Voodoo 5 card too?. Are you running at full textures and settings at max?. I know this is kinda off the subject, but couldn't help being curious as to what im facing out there. At the moment myself, i have to run bare minimum with settings (making the game look drab) to get an overall of 10-15 FPS.....LOL.... This along with a fire delay of 1-1½ seconds in crowded areas makes for some poor performances on my behalf. Yet i can still keep up with the average score on the server. Damn, these guys are in trouble when were on equal terms..ehehe.

Ok, any further ideas on the vid card front, or go for the Voodoo5500.

Thanks for the input guys.....

Shaolin.

[Catpellets]

Hey, dude.. this s what I did...

Duron 750
128mb Pc133 ram
Ep 8KTA2 Mobo

all this is like $240 at Mwave.com

then I got an ASUS Gefore 2 GTS vid card (2nd best out there) and it has Tv out (SVideo) for $188

and a Maxtor 30gb 7200rpm ATA100 from like $140... Enlight case (dont know what the good ones are) Creative 56k modem, creative 52x cd and sony floppy... the good thing about this is that you can get a good deal all in one shipping bill.... (can they ship across seas?)


Thanks CaTPeLLeTs

[glc]

If you are gonna game with a modem, make sure you get a good 100% hardware based modem - avoid winmodems like the plague. Creative modems are awful.

[lsakhvoruk]

Hey man, forget the Maxtor drives, for ~$10-20 you can get the (currently) fastest EIDE IBM 75GXP 30Gig 7200 RPM ATA-100 drive! I have one and its awesome! Also for the mobo consider the Abit KT7-RAID, I don't think it's much more expensive then the Asus A7V. Good luck! Leo.

[Catpellets]

where do you find this info about the deckstars being faster? and what is the differance between a creative modem and an "all hardware" and what do you mean by all hardware?

the epox is actually just as good for overclocking (from what I have heard about the Abit).. you can set FSB, core voltage, multiplier... everything is on little sets of switches..


please tell me if im wrong, thanks CaTPeLLeTs