Upgrade advice needed

Miksu

Regular
Not the first question like this, but here we go.

Situation is this: I used to have Athlon XP based system, until yesterday. Cpu is pretty fast XP Mobile, running at 2.5GHz. Motherboard is Abit NF7-S2. I received new X800Pro ViVo yesterday and I'm not sure what happened, but it seems that the graphics card was faulty and it broke my motherboard too.

So I'm now in a situation where I need a new MB. Do you think I should stick with my old cpu and just buy a new (NForce2?) based MB? Or should I switch the platform entirely and go to new P4-system or Athlon64? Do you think that for example P4 3.5GHz would run any faster than Athlon XP at 2.5GHz? The motherboard situation seems to be little crappy in every platform-genre at the moment. PCI-Express is coming but when?

So, thanks for advices in advance.
 
I can't advise you on the upgrade since I'm still on an NF7-s rev 2 too, but I'd really appreciate it if you could expand a bit on how the X800 broke your mobo.

Like I said, I got the same mobo and was hoping to get an X800 someday.... :oops:
 
Miksu said:
Not the first question like this, but here we go.

Situation is this: I used to have Athlon XP based system, until yesterday. Cpu is pretty fast XP Mobile, running at 2.5GHz. Motherboard is Abit NF7-S2. I received new X800Pro ViVo yesterday and I'm not sure what happened, but it seems that the graphics card was faulty and it broke my motherboard too.

So I'm now in a situation where I need a new MB. Do you think I should stick with my old cpu and just buy a new (NForce2?) based MB? Or should I switch the platform entirely and go to new P4-system or Athlon64? Do you think that for example P4 3.5GHz would run any faster than Athlon XP at 2.5GHz? The motherboard situation seems to be little crappy in every platform-genre at the moment. PCI-Express is coming but when?

So, thanks for advices in advance.

Prolly just a pure badluck ... the best thing i'd say ... Keep your Athlon XP and get a new mobo .. (if you are paranoid .. get another one ( any other good overclocker )) and get another X800 Pro in exchange of the faulty one.

RainZ
 
digitalwanderer said:
I can't advise you on the upgrade since I'm still on an NF7-s rev 2 too, but I'd really appreciate it if you could expand a bit on how the X800 broke your mobo.

It's quite a short story. I removed the old 9700Pro, plugged the new X800 in and turned the computer on. Speaker started giving this long sound every two seconds or so. I turned the computer off, made sure that the X800 was firmly in the AGP-slot and tried again. No go. Then I took the X800 out and tried with my old card and this time the comp shutdown itself in less than a 0.5 seconds after I pressed the power-switch. Actually the fans were only thing telling me that the switch worked because they did some spinning.

I had a change to test my computer parts one by one today and it was nice to notice that the 9700Pro is still working. Motherboard is still dead and when I tried to plug the X800 into an another computer, that comp went "dead" also. Though it came back alive after removing the X800.

I'm not that upset because of the dead motherboard but it's sad that the X800Pro is dead. It was Sapphire's ViVo model which have 100% succes rate when enabling the last pipes with only a bios flash. Those cards have run out of stock here in Finland and it seems that we won't see them anymore. Club3D's ViVo-models are replacing them but a) I'm not sure about their flashing-abilities b) they're out of the stock too.

I think I'm going to get a cheap new MB for the old XP-processor. Like I said in the first post, situation with the motherboards seems to be kinda bad at the moment with so many transitions going on at the moment: PCI-E, new sockets etc.
 
Wow, thanks for telling me the story. Just a bit-o-a-longshot-advice, you might want to try clearing the CMOS on your NF7-s by the pin method and see if that might not give it another shot at life.

You never know, it might work. ;)
 
digitalwanderer said:
Wow, thanks for telling me the story. Just a bit-o-a-longshot-advice, you might want to try clearing the CMOS on your NF7-s by the pin method and see if that might not give it another shot at life.

You never know, it might work. ;)

Tried that couple times, no luck. Going to order a new motherboard for the XP, just need to find a cheap but good board. Not sure if I should stick with the NForce2.
 
Well, I can tell you a P4 at 3.5 GHz will give you quite a bit of a performance boost, as long as you get a 'C' revision. A P4 @ 3.5 GHz approximately equals an Athlon 64 3400+. But that will also cost you alot more as well.

Odd that a graphics card would damage your motherboard. I somehow still think it could be salvaged.
 
I think what most likely happened is your power supply messed up.


But anyway a barton running at 2.5 ghz would be a close match for a 3.5 ghz p4 depending on what your ram is at .

Best bang for the buck if your going to get a new chip is a new steping of the a64 3000+ they are doing 2.5 ghz on air with an nforce 3 250 mobo .

If you want to go cheap and your cpu is still good just get another nforce 2 board .

You'd be hard pressed to find much better performance than the 2.5 barton this side of the fx and ee line
 
Miksu said:
digitalwanderer said:
Wow, thanks for telling me the story. Just a bit-o-a-longshot-advice, you might want to try clearing the CMOS on your NF7-s by the pin method and see if that might not give it another shot at life.

You never know, it might work. ;)

Tried that couple times, no luck. Going to order a new motherboard for the XP, just need to find a cheap but good board. Not sure if I should stick with the NForce2.

Go to newegg.com and enter the refurbished section. You can get a ECS SiS 755 based board for $30 shipped, or a Aopen AK79D 400 Max nForce2/MCP for $50 shipped. They also have a couple opteron/A64 MBs for $50.

Nite_Hawk
 
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