Be Excellent To Each Other

Been sick in bed for the last few days

So not really been doing much. I did reinstall Crysis Warhead and began another play through. Finding it hard, maybe I'm out of practice lol

Crysis was quite easy. Much more than Far Cry

I remembered warhead being really easy. I did however remember the beach part being a fucker. Keep running out of ammo and as soon as you step out youre fucked.

Need to remember what wee trick I pulled last time.

Yay this bit is teh goodness.

So, what the hell do you look for when you need a motherboard? I have not the faintest idea what any of the numbers and names and statistics I see everywhere actually mean.

Device Manager says I have:

An Intel Pentium 4 3.06 GHz processor.

A pair of IDE hard drives, one 40Gb, the other 80.

A DVD drive

Hang on. It's listing two of the same processor here, and apparently I have an "ACPI multiprocessor PC" as a device. Huh. Is that a good thing?

2 x 512Mb memory cards, which I'm fairly certain are DDR.

An Nvidia Geforce 7600 GT PCIE 512M DDR2. Man, when is the hardware industry going to catch on and actually NAME things?

My budget is as little as possible. What do I need to look for? What do I need to be wary of? Can I even get one that will let me use all of the above?

I would question why you want to replace the motherboard and nothing else.

You will need a few things. Firstly, a motherboard that's the right size. The standard size for tower cases is ATX. If you know what your current motherboard is, that would help.

You have IDE drives, which is less than current, though it's still pretty easy to get motherboards that will support it.
If you go to http://www.crucial.com, there's a tool there that will scan your machine and tell you exactly what your current RAM is, this will help.
Your graphics card is PCIE - that's good. Any current motherboard will support that, even if the card is only 1x rather than 16x.

I guess the main thing is getting the right chipset. Your chip will either be a Northwood or a Northwood HT. The good news is that both chips are Socket 478 and a 533 Front Side Bus. So a motherboard that supports Intel Socket 478 is what you need.

EDIT - it's saying you have two of the same because that chip supports hyperthreading (treating the one chip as two virtual chips). So it's the Northwood HT.

I'm only changing the motherboard because I got a bargainous new video card and would like to take advantage of it.

That is very, very helpful, thank you. I will consider sparing your loved ones during the Becoming.

It's an "MSI (Micro Star) MS-6580 V2.0 (845GE Max) Motherboard", apparently. I may have to ply someone with free booze and ask them to find one for me, as I am just confusing myself here.

Is the videocard PCIE? If so and you want the latest lane speeds (16x) you are going to have trouble finding one that will accept your ram and cpu.

Your ram is highly probably DDR1, all new boards use socket 775 (intel) and DDR2.

You will also find your psu does not have 24 pins or the power needed to fire up a DDR2 mobo (plus lots of new graphics cards have a 6 or 8 pin (or two) extra power socket).

If your chip is socket 478 (seems likely) then I think you're going to be a bit stuck.

Highly likely that your P4 is the Hyperthreading technology P4.

This meant it had 2 virtual cores. This was then replaced by the dual core, then the Pentium D, then the Core 2 duo, then the core 2 quad and now the I7.

I don't think you're going to be able to upgrade that rig tbh.

This looks like it would do the trick:

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... 0330296172

It's a micro-ATX board but it should still fit in your case -- you'll just end up with a lot of spare room, that's all (and fewer PCI slots but that shouldn't be a problem).

Hey peeps. I spotted this this morning.

Appears to be an older Aurora with pretty darn good specs.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/alienware-pentium ... 2a0303bc68

Cheap as chips too.

It is available. A bargain at only $849!

I think I'll have to give that one a miss then

I'll take Wednesday 23rd, if anyone's going to open a book.

Looks a cool case...

Nah , *unless* someone pimps it out with some extra special LED's then I'd go for 5 minutes after JC has seen it

Looks like set dressing from some 1980s BBC scifi that chinny might go on about.

I think it's gorgeous.

What's another £800 on the mortgage eh, Grim...?

Too late now

Oh hell yeah it's amazing. Lots of dough though !

What's wrong with this one, JC?

Me too.

Risperidone fucking with my memory lol.