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Old 29-07-06, 21:07
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nirofo nirofo is offline  
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: North Scotland
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Hi Stuart R

Based on the specs you gave earlier your motherboard will support:

1.0Gb of PC133 unbuffered RAM, (2x512mb RAM Sticks). Ebuyer 512MB PC133 168pin SDRAM Memory Module, £78 for 2.

Up to AMD Athlon 1400 (200mhz FSB). EBays probably your only hope here, expect to pay £20 to £25. Make sure it's guaranteed working.

It has onboard 4x AGP graphics chip with no slot for a separate AGP card, this steals from your memory total, you would need to install a PCI Graphics card with it's own built in memory to go separate. Try the £27.57 Hightech 9250 128MB 64bit PCI from EBuyer.

It supports up to Ultra DMA/100, large drives can be used with appropriate drive overlay. The Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 160GB 7200RPM ATA/133 8MB Cache - OEM again from EBuyer is a good drive at £38.58.

It only supports USB1, to use USB2 you need to install a separate USB2 PCI card with the necessary driver software. These cards are cheap, try the 4 PORT USB 2.0 PCI CARD WITH 1 X INTERNAL PORT at £3.98 from EBuyer.

It has built in reasonable quality audio, just add powered speakers, or play back through your HiFi unit.

If you increase the memory to max you will probably need to upgrade your power supply, here's one that will do the trick - Casecom Silver 500w ATX Power Supply at £13.99 from EBuyer.

Based on your spec the computer is easily upgradeable and would show a decent performance gain if it was maxed out using similar components to those indicated above. Whether it's worth spending the money on components that are rapidly becoming obsolete is debateable, for approx £185 you would have a useable computer capable of handling large graphics files, rendering may still be slower than the top spec PC's but what's the rush anyway!

Heres a web address for the motherboard manual, bios and sound driver updates are also available.

ftp://dlsvr02.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/s.../a7svm-103.pdf

ftp://dlsvr02.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/s...-vm/1006vm.zip

ftp://dlsvr02.asus.com/pub/ASUS/misc.../s71812wxp.zip

nirofo.

Last edited by nirofo; 30-07-06 at 02:58.
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