Hi all! Newbie here- After getting by with some stone age flight sims, I doshed out and bought amongst others CFS3 and Maddox Pacific Fighters. It now seems that my trusty games PC is well out of touch with the requirements of the new sims.. I'm wondering if I cam upgrade the thing to Gb speeds, using most of the existing components? I guess I need to chuck out the motherboard, 16 Mb Voodoo card and get some more memory. The graphics card choice is mind boggling for a pseudo div like me!! Current spec P3 450, M6TBA board, Intel SE440BX AGP chipset-100Mhz FSB, ATX midi tower box. VoodooIII 3000 3Dfx card w/16 Mb SGRAM. All means not much!!! Any info gladly received, Cheers!
I doubt you can get by with a 1ghz+ processor on that motherboard, I think your gonna have to go with new motherboard+processor and definately a new video card
Well, from all I can gather off Intel's website, it can support up to a 500MHz Pentium III CPU. You could try a slot 1 100MHz FSB/1GHz CPU, but there's been one or two core changes in the PIII line since the first batches of it. Your motherboard may not support the voltages required, which could fry the CPU. This isn't across the board for every 440BX motherboard, but you're still going to be hard pressed to find a Slot 1 440BX board that supports 1GHz CPU's. You could try eBay, but quite honestly, it's really just time to overhaul the thing. You should be able to keep your hard drive (but if it's under 10-15GB, you really need to consider something bigger), optical and floppy drives, but the CPU, RAM, and motherboard will have to go. If you're power supply isn't a good brand 300W or better power supply (Antec, Sparkle/Fortron, Enermax, Thermaltake), you'll need to factor this in as well. The last thing would be the OS, as the support for Win9x OS's is nearly non-existant. You can get an upgrade version of Win2k or WinXP to save money assuming you have a Win98 disc or later. I don't know what your budget is, but for something decent, I'd budget between $400-600 for some decent parts. If you replace the entire guts of the machine, you can do it for right around $600 or less. Something like this should do nicely, considering most flight sims aren't especially video card intensive. All prices off Newegg. Motherboard: MSI KT6V-LSR ---$50.00 CPU: Athlon XP2600+ 55W ---$91.00 RAM: GeiL 512MB PC3200 Value series ---$79.00 Video card: Sapphire Radeon 9600Pro 128MB ---$102.00 CPU Heatsink: Thermaltake Volcano 7+ ---$18.99 Power Supply: Thermaltake Silent PurePower 420W --$36.99 OS: Windows XP Home Upgrade edition w SP2 ---$102.00 Total: $479.98 not including any shipping costs (but it's either free for basic shipping or just a few bucks) Add a hard drive and an optical drive: Hard Drive: Western Digital 80GB 8MB cache, Serial ATA (SATA) --$65.79 Optical drive: Samsung 52x CDRW/16x DVD-ROM --$35.99 Total: $581.76 Even with shipping, you shouldn't go past $600. You should be able to reuse your case as well, so unless you want to, I wouldn't worry about that. Your current motherboard is a full ATX one, so what I listed isn't going to be a problem.
Big Thanks, Big B I guess at least I can keep the lurrvely old cream case then! :good: I shall investigate further !......
