The choices have narrowed down, and I’ve decided to go with a microstar motherboard. This will be my first upgrade where I’m totally going for bleeding edge power rather than last year’s models.
My new PC will be an AMD Athalon XP 1700 processor (which is rated higher than the Intel P4 2.0 gHZ processor according to an AnandTech report).
The motherboard I’m looking at is a Microstar K7T266 Pro2-RU (some of it’s sexy specs include: 1 AGP slot, 5 PCI slots, 1 CNR slot, USB 2.0 (one of only two motherboards on the market supporting it), Promise PDC20265R RAID support, and an onboard Avance Logic ALC201A AC97 CODEC audio card). I’m going to pick up 256mb of DDRAM (which is around $120.00 now), a couple of case fans, a kick ass CPU fan, and some rounded floppy drive and IDE cables. I already have a really nice looking case, and a new floppy drive sitting in it.
All I have to do now is pull out my hard drive, video card, CDRW, DVD Drive, Ethernet Card, DVD Decoder Board, and Firewire card from my old PC and put them into the new one.
With the old PC, I’m going to add my spare CDR Drive, spare hard drive, and my Banshee video card before I sell it off. It’s still a great PC (Celeron 600 with an Abit BH6 Motherboard 512 RAM, a 4x2x12 Ricoh CDRW, 6.4 Gig Fujitsu HD, and a 16MB 3dfx Banshee Voodoo card), and is awesome for everything except video editing.
This whole new upgrade will end up costing me about $800.00, but that includes the new CDR and the firewire card I bought in November, and the new 40 gig HD I bought in August. Not bad at all for as much power as this thing will have.