Going to Upgrade. Need Some Simple Advice.

[humble]

Its old and slow....but its AGP and would probably let him use his current memory, PS etc...I just dont know where you'd find a compatable cpu...maybe mwave?

[Fulmar]

Ebay or a second hand computer parts store.  There is one where I live that is also a recycling center.

[drdeathx]

I don't understand why someone would recommend motherboards , processors ect... humble. For a bit more you can build a premier system . My suggestion is read up on current technology because quad core is the wave of the future/ Getting a better mother board would be my best suggestion in case you want to upgrade your processor in the future. Humble is on the right direction you can build a good system quite inexpensive but read up on whats available.


OOOH and by the way humble intels are definitely great but amd has come out with some good stuff in the past 6 months and they get good ratings and are much cheaper than intel. Just got a 9850 and its awesome im benchmarking 15,500 in 3dmark06

[Fulmar]

The 9850 does trade blows back and forth with Q6600 and Q6700's in gaming that is.

[Chalenge]

I believe this would be attributed to a faster access time of your DVD burner, not the SATA cable.

Really? I would have thought that SATAII would enjoy much higher bandwidth over IDE either way.

[Chalenge]

...

OOOH and by the way humble intels are definitely great but amd has come out with some good stuff in the past 6 months and they get good ratings and are much cheaper than intel. Just got a 9850 and its awesome im benchmarking 15,500 in 3dmark06

AMD has problems which a lot of us here have experienced in the spinning clipboard issue. Thats why I went with Intel this time round. Also going for quad core when core 2 duo is so much cheaper seems contradictory to your own advice. When quad cores will actually do something useful beyond dual cores then there will also be cheaper quad cores.

[Fulmar]

Really? I would have thought that SATAII would enjoy much higher bandwidth over IDE either way.

IIRC from watching the screen savers a few years back...
Think of IDE/PATA as 2 lane highway (for size comparisons) and SATA as an 8 lane highway.  Clearly the SATA highway can handle more cars on it, but both highways have the same speed limit of 65 MPH.

In the case of Optical drives, the read speeds of disks is pretty slow as compared to hard drives.  So the amount of data traveling down the PATA highway is fairly light on traffic.  So a 8 lane highway isn't going to get the traffic to their destination any faster.

And just like traffic, too much traffic will cause congestion and slow it down, IE reducing the speed of traffic to say 20MPH.  This plays a role when using multiple drives on one PATA/IDE cable (2 HD's or 1 HD and 1 CDRW etc etc).  But since SATA has dedicated cables per device, traffic jams rarely, if ever happen.

[Fulmar]

If I were to buy a new Optical drive today, it would be for sure a SATA drive for the smaller cable, not really speed.