Ram...

[Morgeruat]

www.pricewatch.com is another good place to go, not sure how good it is for europeans, but it's the site i mainly use to research prices and buy components.

[andrewas]

If your not comfortable with building a new machine yourself, find one of those small computer stores run by people who know there stuff, and ask them for advice. They'll usualy beat PCworld on price by a large margin. Go to two or three of them and see what the best deal is.

You'll lose money compared to going online and buying the bits, but you dont risk damaging anything.

Alternately, buy yourself a bare-bones system online and finish it yourself.

[RoSs_bg2_rox]

if u do get a new motherboard and some up-to-date ram then dont put ur old ram in to. ur probably thinkin why? itl be faster with more, but the old ram will only slow u down.

[FelixJaeger]

I have the putting motherboard and ram into computer sorted out my mate will do it cause hes in the process of making his own comp and will enjoy the "practice" [img]tongue.gif[/img] .

Problem is i dunno what to buy :S...theres loads of motherboards n i dunno what there talking about in the description... can I get a little help please?

Heres the selection

You guys know what the best would be for my money...hopefully it wont be over £100 or im gonna be skint for a long time ...

[andrewas]

Ok. A motherboard will set up back at least £100 and probably more. You get what you pay for, and the cheaper brands will not perform.

Also, youll definately need a new CPU when upgrading from a board that old. Thats around at £150, more or less depending on how much you care about peak performance.

And of course, new RAM for about another £100.

Graphics card is the other thing you will be looking at buying, your old graphics card might suffice for a while but it will be a major bottleneck in your new machine. Aim to spend at least £100 on that.

If your on a budget, your as well picking up some cheap SDRAM and waiting till you can afford to do it right, cutting corners when building the machine will not do you any favours later.

I recommend the Nforce2 chipset board from Asus, the A7N8X. The standard version will do. For CPU, the athlonXP series is pretty good, the Nforce2 chipset has a 333Mhz FSB so you want an athlonXP 2600 or higher to take advantage of it.

For RAM, DDR PC2700 or faster. 512Mb minimum I would say, and this board has a dual DDR interface, so you will get more performance if you have exactly 2 DIMMS in it. Your choice as to whether you get a 512 now and another later, or 2 256 now and maybe replace them later, or even get 2 512 (or even 2 1024 if your feeling exceptionaly rich). Just be aware of that performance boost you can get.

Of course, with that much RAM win9x just wont cut it anymore, you need something from the NT line. Thats windows 2K or windows XP. Neither is cheap, but you might be able to get it free/cheap on corporate license. Depends where you/your dad works. Dont pay what M$ wants unless you have no choice.

And finaly the graphics card, if your going to do this you may as well do it right and whatever you have now is going to slow you down. A geforceFX is the only high end card I would rule out, its expensive, runs hot, runs loud, its not a good buy. The geforce4 Ti line is good, as is the radeon 5700 or higher. Of course theres always GeforceMX line if your feeling poor, but that card is not really designed for gaming and wont hold up to future games very well, although it should handle current stuff OK.