[ubuntu-uk] Advice on motherboard upgradw ...

[Barry Drake]

A couple of months back, I was given lots of thoughts on this list about
a motherboard upgrade, and decided to wait a bit.  I'm now thinking of
doing something this Winter and would appreciate advice.  My present rig
has an SiS-741 with an AMD Athlon XP2000+ processor at 1666 MHz.  I have
1GiB memory.

I'm looking at spending around £120+ on a bundle.  The old motherboard
will go into an older box 'as is'.

The only major benefit I want is when rendering video takes (using Kino
most likely).  All the other things I do such as office apps, internet,
e-mail etc are fairly undemanding, so I'm not expecting to benefit a lot
there.  I don't do gaming (sad).

The range of bundles I looked at online is quite bewildering.  I'm
attracted to the Asrock G31M-S bundled with a dual core Intel 2.7GHz CPU
and 2GiB ram, but I'm really not bothered which board, chipset or
processor I get.  

Hardware wise, I want 2xSATA and 1xIDE ...  other than that, I can
manage with whatever I get.  I use firewire for video, but can continue
happily with my pci card.  The box it is going in has a floppy drive -
but I haven't used it in a while ... if provision is there, I'll connect
it, but not vital. I replaced the power supply recently, so 24 pin ATX
is available.

Any thoughts?  And any favoured suppliers?  I might look on e-bay, but
if there are problems, you're a bit in the lap of the gods.  Although
for the most part I've been well served.

Regards,		Barry Drake.
-- 
Sent from my Dell Netbook using Ubuntu - the window-free environment
that gives me real fresh air.