PC Upgrade Plans

[Part three in a series. See also parts one and two.]

Last I wrote, I was trying to figure out an intermediary upgrade plan for my PC. My box is just an Athlon 700, so I’ve been contemplating whether I should upgrade for about a year now. My first thoughts were to go for an Athlon SMP system.

Other priorities interrupted my PC-upgrade plans and, by the point I could consider it again, it looked like Hammer might be on the horizon soon. So, I was going to wait for that, but now it looks like Hammer might be delayed until early next year.

Jason has an old Abit KT7A-RAID motherboard that I was thinking about buying. I was estimating that I could buy the motherboard for maybe $50, and a 1.2 GHz chip to go with it would be about another $50. Really, $100 isn’t bad for an upgrade of that nature.

In response to my last entry, Jon Chan was quick thinking to comment that apparently Fry’s stores had the MSI K7T266 motherboard with Athlon XP 1700+ bundle for just $99!

I was excited to hear that, since the MSI K7T266 sells for about $80 alone at Fry’s. So, this evening I drove off to Fry’s to see what I could find. Sure enough, that deal was listed in their newspaper ad that was posted at the entrance to the store. However, upon asking, they had run out of Athlon 1700+ processors (though they had the mobos in stock). So, I just got a rain check. No big deal.

So, my plan now is to buy that motherboard/processor combo at Fry’s as soon as they get the processors back in stock (which could be next week). Of course, I still need the case, a KVM, and a video card.

Jon mentioned that he may have a KVM lying around, so that certainly makes things easier. The video card is also easy, as I’ll just go for NVidia’s latest.

I’m mostly decided on the case as well. As mentioned in my previous entry, I was rather impressed with the TurboServer case that I saw at Fry’s.

Of course, unlike if I were to buy Jason’s old motherboard, I'll have to buy new (DDR) RAM this time around (in contrast, I could have used some spare PC150 RAM with the Abit). I don't trust generic RAM, and I haven't had any problems buying from either Crucial or Mushkin in the past. For 512 MB PC2100, Crucial is just a touch cheaper than Mushkin ($127 vs $145). And, Crucial has free shipping, so that doesn’t hurt either.

There’s one part that I’m confused about, however. MSI’s website says that the K7T266 supports “up to 3 GB RAM” through“six memory banks using three 184-pin DDR DIMMs”. So… what’s going on there? Does it have six RAM slots or only three? If I were to use (say) 512 MB sticks, three slots vs six slots would mean the difference between 1.5 GB total and 3 GB total RAM.

Then again, I’ll probably just put 1 GB in there to start. So, the total-RAM capabilities issue probably won’t affect me much in the near-term.

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