And another thing, I ran that exact same test on a 15GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 51536U3 Ultra ATA/66 HD (which is the same drive design as my 40GB UATA/100 drive, but with fewer platters and heads - 2 platters/3 heads, versus 4 platters/8 heads for my current 40GB drive), and its average access time was benchmarked to be about 15ms. I used to also have a 15GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 5120 model 91536U6 UATA/66 HD (3 platters/6 heads), which benchmarked to be 13.7ms. But 18.6ms for my current 40GB 7200-rpm HD is slooooow! That old 4.3GB 5200-rpm Maxtor that I mentioned two (of my) posts (in this thread) ago had a benchmarked access time of 18.1ms! UGH!

I found the list of AMD-Recommended PSUs:

My current 300W Antec PSU is on the recommended list - but only for Athlons up to 900MHz and Durons up to 950MHz! (However, that recommendation is only for the older, ATX 2.01-compliant version of that model power supply, whose combined 5V and 3.3V wattage is 150 watts. I have the newer, ATX 2.03-compliant revision of that supply, whose combined 5V/3.3V wattage is 160 watts, and therefore, I may use an Athlon up to 1GHz or any current Duron except the 1GHz version - but surprisingly, the newest 1.1GHz Duron is usable.) If I want to upgrade to an AMD-based system of at least 1GHz, then I will have to upgrade to a 400W PSU! What's going on?

Thus, which is the best CPU upgrade choice (assuming that I will be buying a motherboard that supports the CPU)?

AMD Athlon-1.0GHz (200 or 266MHz FSB - which is better?)
AMD Duron-1.1GHz
Intel Pentium III-1GHz (133MHz FSB)

Huh?

Quote:



I'm digging up this old thread by correcting myself on the Prophet 4500/BX-chipset mobo. That reviewer didn't have an Abit motherboard; he had a Dell system (which uses a motherboard manufactured by Intel).

Quote:



Well, not if I were going to put an Athlon XP processor on that mobo; unlike Thunderbird Athlon-based systems, the performance of Athlon XP-based systems is more seriously degraded when using regular PC133 SDRAM (which is the fastest memory that the VIA KT133A chipset on the KT7A series will support) instead of DDR memory. As a result, the logical successor of the KT7A is the VIA KT266A-based KR7A series motherboards - the latest of which now uses the new VT8233A Southbridge (and thus now natively supports Ultra ATA/133, as well as Ultra ATA hard drives larger than 127GB). The 8233A-southbridge equipped models in the KR7A series are called the KR7A-133 (no RAID controller) and the KR7A-133R (with the Highpoint HPT372 UATA/133 RAID controller); KR7A-series motherboards without the "133" in their name are equipped with the older 8233 (without the "A") southbridge, and thus don't natively support UATA/133 - nor do they natively support UATA hard disks bigger than 127GB.

I'm planning to replace that ECS K7S5A motherboard with something better; ECS isn't exactly a first-tier motherboard maker (quality-wise), and I've heard bad reports of the K7S5A's occasionally coming up with "CMOS Checksum Bad" errors on rebooting. That's annoying, to say the least, especially when I had to manually reset all of the BIOS settings to my previously saved settings every few weeks. Thus, today I bought an Abit KR7A-133 (no RAID) motherboard to replace the K7S5A. I haven't installed that mobo yet; I have to download the latest VIA 4-in-1 drivers before I will replace the mobo, and re-format the HD and re-install Windows XP and drivers and software.

I think Abit is skipping the full-sized motherboards with the newest KT333 chipset for now; the only Abit motherboard that uses the KT333 chipset currently available from that brand is a microATX model that has no legacy ports at all whatsoever and a lot of integrated crap onboard.

Correction on the ABIT KT333 motherboards:

There are two of them: the "legacy-free" motherboard (with an AGP slot and only three PCI slots, and with onboard audio, LAN, and four-channel UATA133-RAID - which brings the total IDE-device capacity to 12) is the AT7 MAX; the conventional one (with no onboard audio or LAN but offers the option of an integrated UATA133-RAID controller, and has an AGP slot and six PCI slots) is the KX7-333(R) (the "R" signifies RAID). I was wrong on the AT7 MAX being a uATX form factor; in fact, both ABIT KT333 boards are standard ATX form factor. And both ABIT boards have four DDR333/PC2700-compatible DIMM slots, but keep in mind that the KT333 chipset itself officially supports only four RAS lines of memory at DDR333/PC2700 speed. In other words, you can only use two double-sided DDR333 modules OR one double-sided DDR333 module plus two single-sided DDR333 modules OR four single-sided DDR333 modules.

And going back to "Which to upgrade?", I upgraded both my computer and my headphones. (Well, not full-sized headphones, anyway, but bought the amazing Etymotic canalphones.) But that took me over 10 months since I first asked this question. My PC is now configured with an AMD Athlon XP 1600+ processor, 512MB of DDR266/PC2100 DDR SDRAM memory, an ABIT KR7A-133 (no RAID) motherboard with a VIA KT266A chipset, a 120GB WD1200BB (not JB) HD, a Built By ATI Radeon 8500 64MB Retail video card (my older Radeon 64MB DDR VIVO card crapped out because it wouldn't hold its geometry, position or size settings for long - it would often reset to factory defaultsoooooyeeeeuuck! ), a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card (no more craptacular bloated Creative driver kits - YAY! ) - and (in addition to my current 8x DVD/40x CD-ROM drive) a 24/10/40x CD-RW drive. I think my next upgrade will definitely be the addition of a decent dedicated headphone amp, and possibly one more set of full-sized headphones (I'm thinking of AKG K501, Beyerdynamic DT250-80, Sennheiser HD 580 or HD600).

Your computer is fine.

You headphones are fine.

Put the $300 aside and think for a while.

Source?

MP3 Jukebox?

Music?

Charity (me!)?