Motherboards - Help ??

[AJ]

Time to give the PC some zip.

I was thinking about one of these

http://www.lmc.com.au/products/Mothe...P5B-PLUS-VISTA

I'm a little bit out of date with these things, I know I'll need new CPU and Ram. But have a couple of questions

I have a P4 just now, will my psu work on this board, and will my IDE disks talk to it ? Or do I have to replace them as well, meaning I'm as well buying a 100% new system

[PAULM03]

Well it says it supports Pentium 4 and PATA (parallel ATA) which I think is IDE.

If I were you I'd just get a new one. I've just bought (well work has just bought me) a new laptop with 2GB ram, 120GB hard drive and 2GHz intel core 2 duo mobile processor
it's the A9-51B on this page:

http://uk.computers.toshiba-europe.c...RIES_ID=129014

Just shy of £600 with an educational discount.

PCs might never be this cheap again.

[GotaFancy?(BPP)]

PSU's are relatively cheap, so shouldn't be too much of an issue - what wattage is your current one? Depending on what you run, I think you should be looking at an absolute minimum of 400w (and probably a bit more!!)

I bought a P5B recently and the main issue I have is PCI slots - only 3 - my graphics card blocks one totally, leaving me with just 2 usable slots. My version had no firewire support either if you need that....

[AJ]

I was looking at dual vs quad core CPUs

anyone got any thoughts, I was thinking Quad core for future proofing, but if my motherboard supports it I could always upgrade later

[robert99]

Very little software, even in gaming, has been written to use the power of dual core, let alone 64 bit computing. That is unlikely to change as the mass market has to cater for the modest needs of single core users. A P4 is more than fast enough for anything in practice, other than gaming. Other work depends more on graphics cards for example. Any future proofing you allow for now will be out of date by the time any demanding software might arrive, if ever. May be better to think more in terms of reliability than the fiction of CPU cores and speeds, and consider, say, use of SATA hard drives set up in RAID, get a Linux setup etc. As usual, you need to sort out what your current real needs are. Buy cheap and when no longer what you need pass it on on ebay.

[AJ]

I got a intel dual core 2 D6750, with a new MB and ATI2600XT graphics card and 2gb of DDR 800mhz ram.

Whole thing is running pretty fast, video encoding in particular is about 20 times faster than my P4 2.53mhz with a 128MB Radeon 9800 pro and 1Gb of ram. An episode of Dr Who that took 45 mins to encode to DVD before was done in about 2.5 mins now.