Be Excellent To Each Other

I think S775 is due a replacement sometime in the next couple of years but I don't really think there's much to be gained from hanging on. In my experience, buying a motherboard that's going to be "futureproof" is a waste of time; even if a socket hangs around for years there's no guarantee that future chips will work anyway (THANKS A FUCKING BUNCH SOYO FOR NOT UPGRADING YOUR SHITTY SOCKET A MOBO'S BIOS FOR ATHLON XPS) so if you're looking to upgrade, you may as well dive in now.

If you're looking for a Socket 775 motherboard recommendation then I've got a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R board and it's lovely; it's since been discontinued in favour of the GA-EP45-DS3R (same board but newer Intel chipset), which can be had for around £80 or so. If you're after a cheap processor (you mentioned about not wanting to upgrade to to something you're "not going to make the most of" so I assume your requirements are relatively modest?) then a Celeron E1200 processor will set you back about £35, or you can pick up an E2160 for about a tenner more; it's virtually the same chip but the E2160 is slightly faster (1.8GHz vs 1.6GHz) and has 1MB of cache instead of 512KB, although from the tests I've seen it doesn't make that much difference. Despite being Intel's bottom-of-the-barrel offering it's still a capable performer -- faster by a comfortable margin than the Intel Atom processors you'd find in netbooks like the Eee PC, and those are "good enough" for most people's desktop needs so the E1200 is more than sufficient for general use.

Thanks for your help Stu, unfortunately I'm an indecisive git and think I might be better off doing a nice upgrade if I'm going to have to do a full reinstall anyway.

I'd been thinking of a Core 2 Duo, probably an E8400, which scan have for just over £100, or maybe I'll throw in an extra £20 and get a E8500.

It looks like I can pick up 2gig of Corsair memory for about £20-£25 (seriously, I paid about that for a 4meg stick many years ago).

So, yeah, I'd probably be looking at spending around £80 on a motherboard. I seem to remember someone recommending Gigabyte boards before (maybe earlier in this thread?), so I've been looking at those too. In fact it looks like the one you mentioned is on scan for £83, so that'll do nicely (although I'll have a proper shop around to see if I can find a better price).


I do have one question though, it seems that this upgrade will drag me kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Every single new motherboard seems to have only 1 IDE channel, and I currently have a hard drive (on it's own channel) and a CDRW and DVDRW on the other one.
I could ditch the CDRW, but the IDE drive is currently my system drive. Is having it on the same channel as my DVDRW a bad idea? If I ditch it and try installing XP to a SATA drive is that going to give me a headache?



Edit - I should point out that I only now have a specific motherboard model to look at, so I haven't checked to see if it's compatible with the cpu I've pencilled in. Also, I'll check out the ram on crucial or something first, because I wouldn't want to do something stupid like order the wrong ram (I've definitely never done that before )

XP to SATA is zero problem at all after SP2.

Cheers Duds, I already have a slipstreamed SP2 disc so that shouldn't be a problem.

What would be my best option then:
Keep the IDE drive as my system drive, with a DVDRW on the samy channel
Use one of my SATA drives as my system drive and use my IDE one for storage.
Ditch the IDE hard drive altogether, but maybe have to buy another SATA drive to make up the 300gig of storage I'm losing.

Ditch the CDRW.

Franky I'd be considering ditching the HDD too and spending £70 on a 1tb SATA drive but obviously that's a cost you might not be able to bear.

Ah, upgrade creep; I've fallen victim to that before!

For what it's worth, the performance difference between the E8400 and E8500 seems to be #sect0" class="postlink">pretty small so you could always put that £20 towards upgrading something that'll make a bigger difference to the overall system; like Dudley says, CDRWs are pretty redundant these days, so £20 will get you a SATA DVDRW (if you want two optical drives, that is) otherwise it'll get you about a third of the way towards a nice 1TB HDD...

Gets me every time.

I'll probably stick with the E8400 then.

I think my main problem here is that I have a pc full of stuff that doesn't actually get used. Like the CDRW, I've no need for 2 optical drives (I even use the DVDRW to burn CDs as it's faster), but it works, and there's room for it, so it's in there.

I should probably also ditch the HDD, it's by far the oldest of my drives, and that's probably not a good idea for a system drive. I've got 750gig of space across my 2 SATA drives, so a 1tb one might be overkill, but I'll need something extra.

I can already see the look on my face going from glee when the box arrives, to sheer horror when I realise how much time it's going to take to get everything up and running again.

Yes, I'm back! (oh no - everyone)

I have done some "window" shopping and have assembled the following:

Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R
Intel Core 2 Duo, E8400
500 GB Western Digital WD5000AACS
2GB (2x1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800)

which comes to £266.71 on scan (a bit cheaper than normal, as some of those items are on Today Only offer)
I've tried Dabs, Ebuyer and Overclockers, but they were all more expensive, anywhere else I should try?

Questions:
The CPU has an FSB of 1333MHz, so I only need 666MHz ram running in Dual Channel, right? (I figured I'd get the 800MHz as it's not much more and I can get a 1600MHz quad core when they get cheaper)
The motherboard has an 8-pin 12V connector, rather than the 4-pin I have at the moment. I assume the EPS12V plug on my PSU will go in there?
Anything else I should know/have got horribly wrong?

Thanks again, everyone.

Have you considered a quad core chip instead?

I had, but admittedly only briefly.
The cheapest one (Q8200) would add £30 to the price (which I don't have a problem with if it's worth it).
The first cpu benchmark I found (which I was only using as a very rough guideline) suggested an E8400 was approximately twice as fast as my current X2 4200+, which I thought was more than fast enough.
I'll give it a proper thought before I buy anything though, ta.

Edit - I am rubbish at buying stuff. Obviously I don't want to get the E8400 and then wish I'd spent an extra £30 to get something significantly better, at the same time, I need to stop somewhere.

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/131950 is in my work machine and is slightly cheaper.

The reasoning here is that a 2.4ghz 2 core chip is massively quick now. A 3.0ghz one will probably not be noticeably more so.

However, when software and OSs start being good at using cores. A 4 core 2.4ghz chip suddenly becomes very fast indeed.

It's a judgment call on how fast you think that's going to happen really. Ultimately I highly doubt you'll be disappointed with either, I have the 2 core version of that linked one in my home machine and 90% of the time it's as quick as the work PC.

Ah, sorry, I was going off the CPU support list for that motherboard and the Q8200 was the lowest one on there, but I hadn't realised there were more Quad Core chips lower down (under the Core 2 Duos that I was looking at).

That one you linked to is only £11 more expensive, so it's looking quite attractive. I'll see if I can find lots of tedious benchmarking websites and see which numbers get me the most excited.

Heh.

yeah the Q6600 is from the initial range of chips (as is my E6600)

Ok, nearly done then.
The one thing that's concerning me is the 8-pin 12v socket.
The motherboard manual has it labelled as "ATX_12V_2X4"
My PSU has an EPS12V plug which looks like it has the correct pinout.

Ok, from reading the motherboard manual, it appears that both the 8pin and 4 pin 12V plugs on my PSU would work. I think.

Edit - After some googling it would appear that either plug will work.
I think I'm going to go with the E8400 as it seems to perform quite a bit better, or just a tiny bit worse than the Q6600 (at least in benchmarks that were relevant to me).

I'll probably look at getting a faster quad core whenever I next get the upgrade bug.