Replacement Components.

Lydesia

I build my own PC about 2 years ago, and i feel its time to upgrade certain components...

I have a AV8 AGP mainboard with a Radeon 9800 Pro card.
2 Hard drives in a RAID 0 Array.
Amd 64 3500+ 939 processor.

I was thinking about doin the following things:

Replacing the motherboard and upgrade to a PCI-E graphics card.
Adding a water cooling system, and RAM.
What board and card would you reccommend? Budget is not a huge problem but i would like to keep under about €400 for the card, and €150 for the mb.

More importantly, how can i install this? Will my hard drives work with a straight port or do i need to format and reinstall windows? How will this affect the working of my PC at present?

Cheers guys.

Dooom

Generally speaking, Windows doesn't like new major hardware, ie. motherboards. So you're best off doing a fresh install. The other data on your hdd will work fine with it (albeit you'll need to reinstall games and apps).

As for the board and card, are you looking at Ati or Nvidia? I'm assuming you'll be overclocking as you mentioned a watercooled setup. Also, will you be planning on going SLi/Crossfire in the future?

Lydesia

Cheers for the reply.

Im firmly a ATI guy, and want to avoid nVidea. Unless you have a reccomendation that would make me switch?
I was considering overclocking but the main reason i want it for is keeping my system a little quieter, i have adjustable fans and unfortunatly unless they are at max the CPU idols around 45 degrees. With load is stick as high as 55. I want to get this down quite a bit.

I must been a bit out of the tech loop, im not sure what SLi/Crossfire is, except relating to a nVidea chipset? Also how would a reinstall/windows authenticate with new hardware, as dosent it take a snapshot of your system?

Cheers.

Dooom

If you get a watercooling setup, your temps will drop, and that'll give you room to overclock some. Assuming you wanted to.
Those temps aren't really that high, my CPU (FX-55) idles at about 45 or so, and hits 60 when under load. Really must get that Xp-120..

Anyway, SLi is (in laymans terms) having two graphics cards running in sync. Crossfire is pretty much the same. Their respective websites will give you all the info you need (SLI, Crossfire).
At the moment, Ati is the way to go - better bang for your buck, aswell as image quality being higher, and price being lower.
The top range cards are about €500+, so I'd suggest one of the X1800 series (great cards, and the X1900's are somewhat more pricey).

As for the mobo, I'll again recommend the Asus A8N-SLI Premium (it's successor, the A8N-SLI32 is ~ €180, but it's worth it if you can stretch). It's got a passively cooled Northbridge, so there'll be no noise there, which will help with your noise level issue. That aside, imo it's a brilliant board with a ton of features.

Alternativley, there's the Crossfire boards. Although they are still new, and lack some of the features of the Nforce 4 boards.

As for your Windows authentication question...I'm not fully sure what you're asking? Probably means I don't know, plenty of other people here do though I'm sure.

Lydesia

Thanks, thats been a great help!

When you install and activate windows a hardware snapshot is taken by Microsoft. I was wondering by installing with new hardware would this void my copy of windows and i would have to buy a new one?

Cheers

Dooom

Ah ok, I get it now. I've never come across that before, but I've installed XP Pro twice on this machine, and the only issue I had was that I had to activate it over the phone.

Tbh, I'd be sure in saying it won't void your copy.

Hope that helps anyway.