Nicholas wrote:
> Thanks for the reply. I'm a little mixed up though. Are you saying that
> the Athalon 64 3700+ will work with my mother board? Also, most of my
> work is with Photoshop, Autocad and other such programs. I have noticed
> that the as my work files get bigger I can see the slow down. This is
> why I am contemplating an upgrade. I am not ready to buy a new machine
> quite yet.
>
> Other info: the memory is a single stick of 512 and the hardrive is SATA.
>
> thanks again for the info.
>

The point is, upgrading your current system, may not give you much of an
improvement. Your options are:

1) Buy a Barton AthlonXP plus a 512MB stick of DDR memory.

2) Buy a S939 processor, a cheap S939 motherboard with AGP slot,
plus a 512MB stick of memory.

For about $50 to $100 more for the S939 system, you end up with the
3700+ processor. And the processor will be overclockable to a greater
extent, than the Nforce2 system would allow. I have an Nforce2, and
there isn't a lot of headroom available at the FSB400/DDR400 level.

Example of cheap S939 AGP motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131558

If you want to go at this upgrade a bit slower, just buy the 512MB stick
of RAM first. As a Photoshop user, that is likely to give you the most
gain. Swapping to disk makes Photoshop dog slow. You know what size images
you are working with, and whether you are in scratch disk country or not.
(Just what your IDE disk LED, after doing an operation in Photoshop.)
For Macintosh computers, I believe the rule of thumb, was available memory
should be 5x the size of the image. If your OS used 150MB of the 512MB,
that would leave about 362MB of memory. Dividing by 5 means you could
handle a 72MB image or so, if the undo option was set to a minimum.
(More undos means more copies of the image stored temporarily, somewhere.
And more trips to the scratch disk.)

Another option, for a memory upgrade, would be to go to 2x1GB, and
retire the 512MB stick. Buying a kit of two in a package, is the
best way to do that, and get a matched pair for dual channel. A
dual channel config of DDR memory, would help with either your
current S462 motherboard, or with S939.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820141236

If the memory upgrade doesn't feel like enough improvement, then you
can reconsider whether staying with S462 socket, or moving to S939,
is the right answer. But don't wait too long, as the number of motherboards
that can take your AGP video card may not be around for much longer.
And the cheap S939 processors won't be around for very long either.
(The 4000+ would have been what I would have recommended, but it
is gone already. Leaving the 3700+ as the next best S939 option
for a reasonable price.)

The S939 upgrade is a dead end, in terms of the future. I only offer
it, to extend the performance range of your upgrade options. For
example, if you were a rabid gamer, then I'd suggest moving to
an even more modern system, as gaming with a dead end system is
a bad investment (nickel and dime upgrades don't help in the long
run). If you are a professional Photoshop user, then
you shouldn't even be trying to upgrade your current system, and
should buy something newer, with much more processing power.
For a pro, time is money. A Core2 Duo would be the right class
of machine, for a Photoshop pro.

Paul