I posted this in the other section then realized i probably should have been posted here.... Im looking to upgrade my pc slightly (nothing HUGE) and i was wondering if anyone could recommend the best socket 478 motherboard and whats the best videocard for the price of around like $150-200 bux? Current pc specs Intel p4 3.0ht Intel d865perl 1gig ram Ati 9800 200 gig hd 80 gig hd im looking to go somewhat easy on the upgrades as im gonna be building the case or a heavly modded case and i would like to try watercooling.
Why do you need to upgrade your motherboard? I would save the money for a complete system overhaul really. A good AGP graphics card for you would be X1950Pro or HD3850. However, both are significantly more expensive than their PCI-E cousins at over $160. That's a lot of money to spend on an old system, when you could upgrade the whole computer for $300.
I would not recommend upgrading your motherboard to another s478. Usually, because the motherboard is the core of the system, upgrading replaces all the other parts to the best an outdated motherboard can handle. In your case, it's not worth it; what are you going to gain? Wait until you can bump the budget to around $300 and get a nice P35 board for socket 775, along with a Pentium Dual Core E2200, 8600gt, and 2GB of DDR2. It'll end up being well over twice as fast as anything you can slap together on s478, and won't cost much more. It's worth waiting a little while to save yourself wasting $200 on a dead-end upgrade of dubious usefulness.
I'm familiar with the drawbacks of the 8600-series. The price-to-performance ratio isn't great compared to the latest shiny stuff, but the price is very low and for that price range the performance is excellent. I'm also familiar with the excellent 9600-series, as I own one. However, I stand by my recommendation, unless the budget can go up even further.
the best 478 board ever is the P4C800-E Deluxe, which I am still using to this day However it would be an outrage to pay for such a board in 2008. A 400$ machine would do much better at pretty much everything
just as the others have said, stay away from s478, my work uses has a s478 with a p4 with 1 gig of ram (just ddr), it struggles to run the booking software and outlook at the same time, everything just gets jammed up on it, but the other machine in the other office, is a s775 with a gig of ddr2, it handles it with ease! like a warm knife cutting into butter!!! So save a bit more and upgrade the whole system!!!
ok great info people thanks i will probably do a mobo/cpu swap then worry about the new case and graphics a little later when budget is little better
