The "BIG" upgrade...

[General_Failure]

Ok so times have changed and I fell the fuck out of the loop when it comes to motherboards.

I understand that PCI express is the way to go now, and I'd like to jump into that power curve, however... I cannot find a motherboard to suit my needs as a gamer/pirate

Current system
Mobo:AT7-MAX2
CPU: XP3000
GFX: ATI Radeon 9800 pro
Ram: pc2700 X2 512mb
sound card: Audigy 2 plat
hard drives: IDE not firewire!
WD 7200rpm 120gig-- 30% full OS
WD 7200rpm 300gig--JBOD FULL
WD 7200rpm 300gig--JBOD FULL
WD 7200rpm 300gig--JBOD 40%
WD 7200rpm 300gig--JBOD 40%
OS: Windows 2k pro

But here is my dillema...and the things I'm looking for

I want to switch to a faster main drive, which is simple enough to get a ultra150 and just hard drive transfer via raid bios. BUT... I haven't found SHIT for mobo's out there that have raid with the old IDE slots and still have raid functionality. this I MUST have cause I'm running 4 hd's in jbod to give me 2 600GB drives

I still want to stick with AMD but I want to move up to the 64 chipset, I want a mobo that has dual cpu capability

burst ram capabilities

still have my raid so I don’t lose my archives q.p

must get into pciexpress

But since the only things I have in pci are a network card and the audigy I can live with 3 pci slots



So anyone know of a MB that even comes close to what I’m looking for? Cause I don’t -.-

[NERD]

Look up on newegg, or Tom's Hardware, Hard OCP.

I'm not sure if this is the best time to invest heavily into upgrading your computer though. 64 bit computing is just catching on, and things will change once again when Vista comes out, whenever that would be. Of course, Vista could be like Windows ME and just implode, though it doesn't seem to be heading that way yet.

[nice gaijin]

Is your computer so painfully slow that you have to buy all new stuff?

bide your time, good things come to those who save their money.

[NERD]

If I were to upgrade that computer, first scrap Windows 2000 and go with XP. Then upgrade the RAM, it's probably the best upgrade in terms of price/performance ratio. Then, I'd go out and get a new GPU. With that, you should be able to play FPS games like Battlefield 2 and Counter Strike:Source without much problems, and not spending too much money until the next generation of stuff comes out.

I'm estimating about $400 for GPU/OS/RAM upgrade.

[nice gaijin]

My only issue with upgrading a graphics card at this point is that he said that he wanted to go with pci-e. I have a friend who wanted to the do the same thing from his old system (which was in fact long overdue for an upgrade) and ended up buying a new computer except for the case. If you are really going to move to pci-e a major upgrade becomes necessary. If he was to eventually move up to pci-e, there's no point in dropping a few hundred on a new agp card now.

So if you have the money to burn, go for it, personally I would put off the upgrade until my current system is frustratingly slow. If you are seriously considering a dual cpu system, why not go with a dual core athlon 64?

[General_Failure]

It isn't that the computer is slow, it's just not meeting up to my standards anymore. And I know a lot of the things I’m wanting is new, but I don’t care, the only thing on this computer ATM that I haven’t changed is the OS cause it’s rock solid and been running for 4 years.

H'ok, Kobun, I've opted to ignore your opinion, since it's invalid at this point. I don't play FPS'ers, this is for video/CGI/multimedia, XP sucks for that, I'd rather switch to a mac(hahaha, no).

And yes, I understand that I'm going to be building a brand new computer since I can only use um....the sound card after I'm done with it.

BUT, I've figured out my solution to get the raw power and still keep all my drives. 2 computers! one for nothing but hard drive space and the other for my programs, see simple as that ^^ oh and a router

Now I can get the mobo I was already looking at, but lacked the features I needed at the time. ^^

Though this was more of a motherboard question post than how to build a system. I still deal with computers daily from idiots with broken OS’s(*COUGH* XP XP XP), it's just NO ONE has been around with PCI-E yet, so I'm going to take the leap. Also would like to point out, no one has come back to me with a windows 2k problem yet, the XP fuckers keep coming, oh well, money and dew in my pocket ^^

[Xuande]

I'm curious. What's broken about XP (aside from the licensing) that makes it bad for multimedia?

[General_Failure]

Crashes like a little whore, and I can do the same thing in win2k and not have that problem. I HATE SP2, and they force feed you that shit cause of the security issues already exsistant in XP, and pro. And a friend of mine has basicly the same setup as me, but, he runs XP and I lost count on the amount of times he's had to roll back drivers, re-install xp, etc. It isn't worth it to me, after I had a HD burn out and lost the majority of my programs, I still haven't recovered from it. So if I whipe and start fresh(which I dont need to) I would be SOL when it came to putting the programs back on my system.