Hi all,

Well my PC ain't the best anymore, but it'll be fine for about a year at maximum. (Specs in profile). I'd like to upgrade in 6-9 months, and I'll have some newly earned cash from the summer in my pocket as well. What types of technologies (or advancements) are coming out between now and then? I was thinking of DDR2, the latest ATI or Nvidia card, one of the fastest CPUs proportionate to cost and the best motherboard/memory. New soundcard and speakers most likely as well. I'd probably need a DVD-RW "all-in-one" drive and perhaps a memory stick reader or floppy drive. I can keep my keyboard, mouse, monitor, printer and scanner, as they'll very good for years.

Thanks

PS, how much of a performance boost would I get my going to DDR PC2700 on my system? (New mobo of course)

you would see a very noticable difference going from PC 133 to PC 2700. a few months ago I upgraded my wifes PC from a 1.2 GHZ Tbird with 512 of PC 133 to a athlon XP 1800 with 256 of PC 2700. but the first thing I did was put the 1.2 GHZ in the new motherboard to see what difference the PC 2700 made and it was very noticable. I recently added another 256 of PC 2700 to her computer and it runs even smoother now.

you should see even more performance increase than I did since your P4 has a 400 mhz FSB and the athlon I used had only 266 FSB.

OK, do you think I should perhaps do that to tide me over for the next half year or make do?

right now it would be the cheapest upgrade. PC 2700 DDR is dirt cheap right now. I just bought a 512 stick of PC 2700 ( Kingston) from newegg for 61.50. Last month a 256 stick of the same brand cost me almost 80.00. so I would snag a stick of 512 and a decent motherboard and you will be pleasently suprised at the performance boost it will give you.

Any ideas exactly how much? Right now I'm just at about 7000 3Dmarks using 3Dmark 2001. Haven't tested in 2003 yet.

Thanks

OK, got 1320 marks in 2003.

my kids computer has a athlon XP 1800 512 PC2700 and a G4 Ti4200 64MB DDR. the 3Dmark 2001se score is currently 10,150

so I would say you should see that score or better with your 1.7Ghz and PC2700

Wow! That would be 3000+ marks! I'll probably take it.

I ran a Sisoft Sandra bench on the memory, and got some interesting results. I got around 900Mbps with mine, but an Intel D845PE mobo with 512MB of PC2700 got around 2.6GB/s!! If I can get an image host, I'll post the pic, it compares mine to a few other configs as well.