MOBO/CPU upgrade

[mjochim]

I have a Micron P3 450 MHZ Millenia Max system that is running out of gas -- but it has a good ATX tower case and some good components, so I am planning to upgrade the CPU and MOBO.
I've done a lot of reading here and elsewhere, but this is bigger than anything I've tried under the hood before. Any advice or cautions before I jump in?
I plan to install the following (because they seem like a good value due in large part to THG research):
* MSI "PT880 Neo-LSR" PT880 Chipset Motherboard
* Intel Pentium 4 HT 2.8E GHz 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache
* 2x256 DDR400 RAM
The machine is a standard family PC that we are using more and more for multimedia (editing movies with Video Studio cripples the machine today) - I recently upgraded the video card to a Visiontek 64mb (ATI Radeon) 9100.
Am I off base? Any concerns about these components?
Regards,
Matt

 

[Crashman]

Take a look at your CASE! If it's one of those Palo Alto plastic cases, it uses a smaller cover plate over the connectors on back, and you probably won't be able to fit any of these newer boards with the nonstandard port locations. Also, that board looks fairly sucky to me! And the CPU will likely run hot!

I'd go low budget and get the AMD XP2800+ with the $35 SiS 748 chipset board that Compgeeks offers. That board has the ports in the standard locations (although you might need to cut any missing holes into your backplate).

After all, you don't want a board that doesn't fit, and you already have a low budget video card.

Also, dual channel doesn't really matter with the board I mentioned, I'd probably get 1 512MB DIMM.

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