[MILAMBER]

I deal with this stuff all the time and I this is what I think:

I used to have the BH-6 motherboard a long time ago and there are a couple of things that you need to fix.

With a bios update, you can get your BH-6 to support ATA33 hard disk support. That is a maximum of 33 megs per second transfer rate from your hard drive. They are up to ATA133 now and believe me it makes a world of difference. So, if your HD is ATA 66 or better, I would recomend a hard disk controller card.

The BH-6 is also a slot PIII board so the only way you can get to a socket 370 PIII is with a daughter board and those suck. Additionally, any PIII you buy now will have a 133 mhz bus, and the BH-6 doesn't support a 133 mhz bus.

Your power supply won't do anything for you unless your current one is going bad. You could probably tell if that was the case because it would make noise. If your current is 250 W or better you shouold be fine for a PIII. When you get into P4 and AMD chips the power becomes more of an issue.

Buy a a$$load of ram while the prices are down. You can get a 512 meg chip for about $39.00 now and a couple of those will make a difference.

Upgrade your OS. Win2K and XP are about 30% faster then Win9x for most things, internet especially. You will also love the stability.

A new graphics card can never hurt. A good card for the money is the Geforce2 Ti200. You can get one for under $100.00 and it will run anything you would want game-wise without any problems.


Unless you want to swap your motherboard and processor out (and I would do both at the same time) just do these other things and you will notice a huge difference. The first priorities are the ATA 100 disk controller with a HD that can use it, Win2K or XP, and memory. These are all things you will want to change eventually anyways and things that you can take with you when you step up the rest of the machine.