For PC, not car

At the mo we have:

MB: PC Chips M848A

CPU: Athlon 2000+

RAM: 512MB 400mhz

VGA: Radeon 9550 256MB

It goes ok I guess, budget is tight and wanna upgrade. I've been thinking of....

MB: PC Chips 957G

CPU: Celeron D 2.93Ghz

I could add an extra 512MB at a later date and maybe upgrade the graphics when I next do the CPU as it will no doubt have to be PCI-Express.

Any more ideas?

Your processor must be a Socket A chip - so you need another Socket A chip to go in its place. I think the Celeron chips are not socket A - therefore I recommend the AMD Sempron 3000

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=16555302560&action=c2VsZWN0X3Byb2R1Y3Rfb3ZlcnZpZXc=&product_uid=83811

Otherwise its a new motherboard as well.

The simplest one would be a cpu upgrade to the 3200+. The 2000+ runs the fsb and memory at 266Mhz so going to the 3200+ (400Mhz) would give nice increases on both. The downside is cost, AMD is not making them anymore so they're going for silly prices: £100-130. If you go for a new board I might be tempted by something a little better than PC Chips, i changed from PC Chips to Gigabyte and haven't regreted it one little bit. Also, you may want to think carefully about Celeron versus Pentium and even 32 bit versus 64 bit.

Jason, we've spoke on MSN about me needin a new board and yes, I'll be getting one.

Dave, cost is a problem with Pentium's. The prices are silly and out of my reach. As if I pair a CPU with a Gigabyte motherboard. PC Chips have come a long way and this one I'm using now cost £21 and I've had no problems, nor have I heard of any problems with it either. It's all money sadly. :(

Fair enough, my PC Chips board was a 300Mhz K62 so that was a while ago! What do you want the upgrade for/to do? My Athlon 2000+ is good enough for everything but gaming. You could throw more memory at it, thats always a plan. I would be wary of Semprons or Celerons over your Athlon though.

What's your budget?

If you can stretch to about £150, I'd go for the cracking gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9. It's an nforce 4 mobo with everything on it. USB, firewire, SATA, 7.1 sound, nVidia built-in GPU. Of course, you'd need a new socket 939 CPU, so depending on budget, go for a cheap 3200+ winchester AMD64 or for a low-end Opteron.

You won't get to use your ATI graphics card, and whilst performance of the built-in vga on the mobo isn't very good at 3D, you have a PCI-x slot ready for when funds allow / requirements demand

Oh, and as Dave said, a S939 mobo will walk all over a celeron in terms of cpu-intensive tasks. You can even reuse your existing DDR memory. If you have two 256MB sticks, you can benefit from dual-channel performance. If you have a single 512MB stick, you can then get nice dual channel performance when you upgrade by sticing in another 512MB stick.

Oh, and the gigabyte mobo is entirely passively cooled so no noisy fans to worry about either

Any of these any good.....or is it too much

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/barebones.html

Any of these any good.....or is it too much

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/barebones.html

I wouldn't go for one of those, unless it was for a S939 system, at which point it becomes quite pricey...

I certainly wouldn't "invest" in a nforce3 chipset - it's old technology.

It is going to be for gaming, hence why my 2000+ is starting to get old, it's been fine for about 2 years though, so I can't complain and it only cost about £200 all in.

Rob, I think they could well be too much :(

As its for gaming, would I benefit from a 128mb graphics card running on PCI-Express rather than a 256mb one on AGP? I have no idea.

That board you recommended Xav, its socket 754, which is old tech, in the future, I would be looking at only a Sempron anyway, I thought with the Celeron, I could just upgrade to a all singing and dancing Pentium if I feel flush in a few months. Also, I don't think my Athlon has much more than 256kb of cache anyway, so I'd be unlikely to feel any downgrade in performance at all, I'm obviously hoping the other way.

I have just the 1 stick of 512mb RAM. I won't be after SATA (does this mean I'd need a new HDD as mine is IDE?) or Firewire or RAID, just USBx4, LAN and onboard sound.

Thanks for the start though guys. If £150 would mean getting something with a fair bit more oomph, I may be able to stretch.

I would steer clear of ANY pc chips motherboard to be honest. Yes they are cheap, but they have been in trouble so many times for reporting on board cache levels that dont exist. There was a big hoo har about some of their motherboards. Someone decided to investigate why their boards were so slow and unstable and found that the chips on the motherboard were fake bits of plastic and did nothing. It was a while ago, but I would never trust a company that did something like that.

I would definitely make sure you go for an nforce board. Stick to socket 939. Get the best processor you can afford. Stick atleast a gig of ram in, and look for the best graphics card you can afford as this is going to be for games. If your expectring to play some of the latest games your gonna need to budget for around 5-600 pounds to make it worthwhile. Also get a decent PSU. Dont buy a cheap crap one as you dont want to spend all that money then the thing that powers it goes bang.

As you say its for gaming I would stick to ahtlon 64's. No point going for a pentium as the athlons consistently benchmark higher for gaming. Sempron's dont fall into this category.

I know you are working to a budget, but for gaming you really need to spend a little more to get value for money.

The gigabyte motherboard is a Socket 939 clicky

You don't need to use SATA - you still have two IDE channels with master and slave, so your existing hard drive can be used on that.

Oh, and I meant getting a Venice core, not a Winchester one. Venice clock better and are thermally more efficient if ever you decided to overclock (they do rather nicely!)

Pricewise, if you get that mobo and a 3200+ retail (comes with fan) Venice core, it's just under £160 inc vat.

To be fair, the onboard graphics probably won't be as quick as your existing AGP setup, but I'd highly recommend it.

I would have also suggested keeping your existing motherboard and upgrading the CPU to a Sempron, like you've suggested, but I don't know how well they'd work with a PC chips mobo. Plus, you're investing (admittedly less) in a chip that has no upgrade path, and you'd have to ditch it all in a year's time when cash allows for a further upgrade.

Bottom line is in terms of 3D performance, you can either step up to latest platform and not get super gaming performance until funds allow for a proper PCI-e graphics card, or get something that will marginally improve what you have at the moment, but be obsolete in 6 months / whenever you next want to upgrade.

edit: if you want a car analogy, you can spend £400 and get a remap on a 1.4 16V petrol which will then reach it's limit or change for a 1.9PD (or 1.8T if octy!) and then have a whole new realm of tweakability :P

Gav, I wish I had 5-600 pounds to spend, all money as always :( Having said that, this PC runs COD2 very well and that only came out in November, it can play todays games, but its getting a bit close now. For example NFS:MW needs a 1.4ghz CPU, mine can play it, but not by too much. If you look on ebuyer, the reviews this board and the one I've looked at have come highly recommended, even this one, cheap as it is, is so stable.

Xav, to get a Sempron working, you have to reflash the BIOS, not something I want to do really as I've never done it before, its the same on all Athlon XP boards. I was hoping something along the lines of a Celery would give me a good 2 years power, then get border line, just like I've got now. Looks like I may have to stay as I am for a month then :( Shame as the board and processor I put, doesn't look too bad I thought, guess I'm wrong. But then thats why I asked.

I would steer clear of ANY pc chips motherboard to be honest. Yes they are cheap

Would echo this...the problem nowadays isn't so much that the boards are necessarily bad, just that the quality control isn't consistent - corners are cut to get them down to a price.

So you tend to get people who say they're fantastic value for money as they happen to have got a good example, others wouldn't touch them with a barge pole due to getting a dodgy one. Statistically I think you're more likely to get a good one than not, but for the sake of