First some background:
1. Although I have taken apart my case dozens of times to replace various things, this is my first mobo/cpu replacement - hence, my alias
2. My pcs are an IBM Aptiva celeron 500 128 meg mini tower bought ~1 yr ago and a HP Pavilion P2 266 48 meg full tower bought ~3 years ago.
3. Looking to replace the mobo, cpu, mem, and graphics card similar to the article "A new lease on life" written Oct 5.
I am looking at the P4 1.4 gig since it seems the best for the money ($125) on the pentium platforms anyway (I can't install an AMD in a former Intel machine right?)
What motherboard should I get for this? The Gigabyte GA-8IDX3 seems pretty good, and at 100 bucks seems a good price. 3 dimm slots for 1.5 gig mem, 6 pci, 1 agp. For video, looking at the Geforce 2 MX 400 64 meg. For mem, 512k pc133 sdram from Crucial (is DDR really worth the $$$?)
My concerns are:
1. For cases and power supplies, everywhere I see "Pentium 4 ready." What does this mean? Can my old case, fan and power supply handle a P4 1.4 gig? How much power would I need? Peripherals would be a cdrom, hd, floppy, Geforce 2 MX 400, modem and I think thats it.
2. Which pc should I upgrade? I would actually prefer to ugrade the older HP, and keep the aptiva as a backup. Might as well throw out older chips, anyway.
3. Where's the best place to buy parts? I found mwave.com which seems pretty good: good reviews here at Toms, good prices, tons of parts, and best of all: only seller I have found that offers preassempled mobo+cpu bundles. I am a bit nervous about installing a cpu and heatsink since if I get it wrong you fry your processor.
Thanks for reading, sorry so many ?'s. But I have read tons on this website before posting, so I've done as much homework as I can on my own, now just need some help from experts.
Thanks all! =)
1. Although I have taken apart my case dozens of times to replace various things, this is my first mobo/cpu replacement - hence, my alias
2. My pcs are an IBM Aptiva celeron 500 128 meg mini tower bought ~1 yr ago and a HP Pavilion P2 266 48 meg full tower bought ~3 years ago.
3. Looking to replace the mobo, cpu, mem, and graphics card similar to the article "A new lease on life" written Oct 5.
I am looking at the P4 1.4 gig since it seems the best for the money ($125) on the pentium platforms anyway (I can't install an AMD in a former Intel machine right?)
What motherboard should I get for this? The Gigabyte GA-8IDX3 seems pretty good, and at 100 bucks seems a good price. 3 dimm slots for 1.5 gig mem, 6 pci, 1 agp. For video, looking at the Geforce 2 MX 400 64 meg. For mem, 512k pc133 sdram from Crucial (is DDR really worth the $$$?)
My concerns are:
1. For cases and power supplies, everywhere I see "Pentium 4 ready." What does this mean? Can my old case, fan and power supply handle a P4 1.4 gig? How much power would I need? Peripherals would be a cdrom, hd, floppy, Geforce 2 MX 400, modem and I think thats it.
2. Which pc should I upgrade? I would actually prefer to ugrade the older HP, and keep the aptiva as a backup. Might as well throw out older chips, anyway.
3. Where's the best place to buy parts? I found mwave.com which seems pretty good: good reviews here at Toms, good prices, tons of parts, and best of all: only seller I have found that offers preassempled mobo+cpu bundles. I am a bit nervous about installing a cpu and heatsink since if I get it wrong you fry your processor.
Thanks for reading, sorry so many ?'s. But I have read tons on this website before posting, so I've done as much homework as I can on my own, now just need some help from experts.
Thanks all! =)