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

[Rob Beard]

On 17/10/10 15:29, Barry Drake wrote:
> 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.

I'd suggest either Aria or eBuyer.com.  I believe both actually now do 
bundles of either AMD or Intel CPUs.  For around £120 I'd expect you 
could get an Athlon II X2 or Pentium Dual Core.

For future proofing I'd possibly suggest looking at either an AMD AM3 
motherboard with DDR3 ram or Intel Socket LGA 1156 motherboard with DDR3 
memory if you can afford it (the LGA 1156 kit will probably push the 
price up by another £70 though).  This would give you a bit more future 
proofing though, you can drop a faster CPU in if and when funds allow 
(okay you can drop a Phenom II X6 into an AM2+ motherboard but you don't 
get the full performance due to the limitations of the AM2+ socket and 
slower DDR2 memory).

I dare say whatever you get though it's going to be a big improvement on 
the Athlon XP 2000+

Rob