Upgrade Kits

[Shovel]

Hey guys just a quick one.

I'm finding my PC irritatingly sluggish, but it might be the last PC I own for a while, so don't want to go overboard upgrading it. It just needs to last long enough after I graduate for me to afford something Appley. I also don't play games much any more, so I'm looking to recycle my Geforce 4 Ti42000 (thus stay AGP).

Komplett have a handy looking upgrade bundle, but I have a few reservations (apart from needing to double check I can afford it).

• Is it going to run OK on a 300W power supply?
• Is there any hope of installing an upgrade this substantial, without having to reinstall Windows XP (because it's running quite well at the moment)?
• Athlon 64 3000+ - will a Zalman Flower Copper+Alu be sufficient to cool it?
• I am totally out of touch with motherboards: Is the VIA K8T800 Pro a stable chipset? I know they went through a rocky patch around the Athlon XP era, although the generation before were pretty solid.

Thanks for any advice,
Ben

 

[SheepCow]

Is it going to run OK on a 300W power supply?

I don't see why not. Unless you've got a USB 1kW heater?

Is there any hope of installing an upgrade this substantial, without having to reinstall Windows XP (because it's running quite well at the moment)?

Change of motherboard generally means reinstalling Windows.

Athlon 64 3000+ - will a Zalman Flower Copper+Alu be sufficient to cool it?

That upgrade kit comes with a boxed CPU. The box will have a hs+fan in it. Use the stock cooling it works fine.

I am totally out of touch with motherboards: Is the VIA K8T800 Pro a stable chipset? I know they went through a rocky patch around the Athlon XP era, although the generation before were pretty solid.

No idea, I've avoided them ever since then

 

[Shovel]

Change of motherboard generally means reinstalling Windows.

Yeah, that's what I feared. I have a friend at Uni who reckons he was able to upgrade his manchine on a similar scale (motherboard included) and Windows survived, but I have a feeling that luck might be a contributing factor.

That upgrade kit comes with a boxed CPU. The box will have a hs+fan in it. Use the stock cooling it works fine.

The reason stems from the Flower being gorgeously quiet. I know stock fans can be hit-and-miss in terms of noise pollution.

Thanks very much though. I no, I don't run any planetary defence lasers off my USB, I just wanted to check, given that all recent PSU discussion around here has concerned anything from 400 to 600W units.

 

[Clown]

I upgraded motherboard, memory and processor. Kept the same hard drive. It worked, although I had to install some other drivers.

 

[Shovel]

Of course, what I've just realised is that I can't reuse the current Zalman flower anyway, since the socket is a different shape. How obvious is it that I'm increasingly detached from PC hardware?

 

[SheepCow]

lol I didn't even think about that. Yes it will be socket 939. I have a 3500+ with AMD's stock cooling. It's pretty quiet, or at least I can't hear it over the craptastic fans in my case.

 

[.Wilier.]

Ive had a couple of K8T800 mobo's recently, a Gigabyte job and currently an Abit AV8. The Gigabyte was arse to be honest, but the Abit is great.

As for the Flower cooler, you may well find that you can get a different mouning clip to fit the cooler to the 939 socket, since the base of the cooler is the same whether its 939, SoA, 478 or whatever.

 

[inactionman]

I think shovel is refering to the old zalman flowers, with the fan on a bracket above. They were designed for Socket A/whatever intel had at the time. I don't think they'll really cut it nowdays, I believe they don't cool enough, particularly the copper/aluminium one (doesn't cool as well as the pure copper one, but they weigh a lot!). If you want a silent heatsink/fan the new zalman's are good, and other manufacturers do quite a selection of pretty good products.