First, I'm going to assume this is a budget upgrade, because running
a video card and ram memory from an old 60 mhz with a new cpu
will hurt performance, so performance may not be your primary
concern. If this is the case, I recommend a socket seven
motherboard with an AMD or Cyrix cpu. A Cyrix PR 300 or an AMD
266 mhz use a 66 mhz bus so it will allow you to use the cheapest
Pentium motherboards, but with the least upgradability. Such boards
will still use 72 pin edo ram memory and the AT style power supply
you have in your case. If you have a serial mouse and AT keyboard,
they will still be compatible too. Motherboard, cpu and fan will sell
for about $115.00
For cheap performance, I have been buying for my own use Intel Celeron
based systems using motherboards based on the LX 440 chipset. You
will need a new ATX case and SDRAM to replace your current ram, but
the price for the cpu, motherboard and fan are less than $125.00 on the
web and the performance is noticeably better than the other choice I
mentioned above. You should also budget for an AGP video card as soon
as you can so the Celeron system gives you all of its performance potential.
You may have to replace your keyboard and mouse with PS/2 style ones,
or purchase adapters for them.
Tom Turak
----------
At 03:13 PM 4/30/99 , David Hurst wrote:
>I have an old Gateway 2000 60 Mhz Pentium in a large tower case,
>running Win95.
>There is a very limited upgrade path for that system I am told...
>only to 120Mhz via an expensive overdrive chip..so I am
>considering just replacing the entire motherboard and CPU, going
>to probably a 300 Mhz CPU. My question is will i need an AT or
>ATX type MB to fit that kind of case ? Anything else I should be
>concerned about, since I want to use all the other existing
>componets (video card, 16 bit sound card, CDROM, NIC, floppy and
>hard drives) ?
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