Upgrade a P3 500Mhz System?

[Raczyk]

I dont wanna spend alot of money on a new system just yet. So I'm curious if a Promise Ultra133 TX2 ATA Controller will work to its full potential on my System. I have an 80 GB ATA/133 Maxtor drive which will not work in the system cause of its size(older motherboard). When I do put in this controller will the drive be able to work at its theoretical transfer rate potential of 133MB per second, or is there going to be a speed bottleneck in the motherboards PCI bus transfer speed or the processing speed of the CPU?

 

[sjonnie]

Check your motherboard manufacturer's website, they may well have a BIOS update that will allow your 80GB drive to work with your old motherboard.

The transfer rate of 133MB/s is just marketing gobbeldygook. Infact the PCI bus's maximum data throughput is 127.6Mbytes/s but no hard drive comes close to reading data from the physical disk at this speed, your drive will read at about 45MB/s tops but bursts from the cache can reach the PCI bus maximum. Anyway, asuming your motherboard has BUS mastering enabled there should be no bottle necking caused by the slower CPU and RAM.

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[Raczyk]

I checked the Ausus website and I do have the latest BIOS version. Although they do have beta drivers
"drivarsP2-99 (without hardware monitor) Beta BIOS 1013.005" are these beta drivers safe?

If I do go ahead and buy the ATA133 controller, roughly how much of a performance increase can I see? My current Asus P2-99 only supports two channel UltraDMA/33. So i assume getting the new controller would make my CD/DVD drives work faster also. Or will it not make a difference.

 

[Crashman]

The only drives it will make work faster are hard drives. You WILL see a difference in hard drive speed.

1x for CD's is 150KB/s. So 100X would be 15000KB/s. That's around 14MB/s...far slower than your UDMA33 interface. And nobody makes 100x drives anyway.

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[JohnnySMac]

If you want more horsepower with your existing mobo, etc look into a processor upgrade from PowerLeap. I upgraded my old P2 450 slot 1 processor to a P3 1.4 Celeron while keeping everything else intact. It was a nice upgrade for around 160 usd.

JohnnySMac