MoBo Upgrade

"jime" wrote in message

 > I have a AX6B+ w/ PII 400. Old and slow. I would like to upgrade my board
 > and CPU. But I want to use my drives (ATA100s) and maybe my memory. I
don't
 > want to go all new. I would even consider a used board.
 >
 > What are my options?
 >
 >

You can use the ATA100 drives in the new boards that support ATA133. They
will just run at ATA100 speeds. As far as the memory goes, this will really
limit your choices of motherboards, as well as slow your system
significantly. My personal recommendation would be to sell your memory
(perhaps EBay) and replace it with the faster DDR memory. Down the road you
will regret not doing this. SDRAM is getting decent prices on EBay, so you
wouldn't have much of a cash outlay to upgrade to DDR400. 256MB of DDR400
will out perform 512MB of PC133 RAM, so keep that in consideration. If you
are open to using AMD processors, you should look into getting something
like an AOpen AK77-8XN board. These are currently being phased out, but will
still support an XP3200+ processor. Right now the prices are very attractive
on the XP2000-2400 range of CPUs and the board can be had for about $70 or
less if you shop around. Couple this with about 256MB of DDR400 memory and
you'll have a sweet system with lots of room to upgrade. The board will
support up to 3GB of RAM. One last note, if you go with a Pentium 4 board
and CPU, do not use the RDRAM memory boards. The memory is quite expensive,
and does not perform as well as DDR400.

Chris