Asus a7n8x upgrades

[pruny]

First of all, I wasn't sure where this belonged in the mobo or gaming section, but this seemed right.

I'm sure someone's gonna hate me for how obvious these questions would be to someone who knows all this, but I'm trying to save myself reseaching time as I have only a few clues as to what I'm doing. I want to upgrade my mobo for wow. Yes, I haven't played wow, I know. Been busy for years, just not enough time to commit. I need a new cpu, ram, video card, and possibly whatever card I need to make this ancient beast handle broadband, and I assume a router for the broadband, but I'm not really sure. I'm running XP.

I can handle installation, but compatibility is what's really confusing me. I see a lot of different versions of the mobo such "asus a7n8x-VM/400", -x, -e, and somewhere I saw mention of "deluxe". On my board, below what I think is my currently installed boardband card, if that's the term, is "ASUS A7N8X". No "-_". So I'm just not sure what components it can handle, and I don't have the time or money to cut corners.

I'm basing my searches on these "Recommended" specs for the lich king expansion.

Processor: Dual-core processor, such as the Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2
Memory: 1 GB RAM (2 GB for Vista users)
Video: 3D graphics processor with Vertex and Pixel Shader capability with 128 MB VRAM Such as an ATI Radeon X1600 or NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT class card or better


I found this for ram, and was going to get 1g, but the "VM/400" made me uncertain as to it's compatibility.

crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=A7N8X-VM%2F400


For the cpu, this was suggested to me by a random person, but, again, no clue if it will work.

newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819104319


As to the videocard and "broadband card", and router, I'm clueless. I'd appreciate any help.

 

[EXCellR8]

The A7N8X is a legacy socket 462 motherboard; you can't install a socket AM2 processor. If you really wanted to meet recommended specs for that game, you would need to swap both the motherboard and RAM in addition the the CPU. The best processor for that board would be either an AthlonXP 3200+ or an overclocked mobile AthlonXP 2600. Both chips are a little hard to come by nowadays. The RAM you found would work just fine; Crucial makes good stuff.

 

[pruny]

Ya, was afraid of that. Guess I'll just have to save up for awhile and hit a comp shop.

 

[EXCellR8]

Ya, was afraid of that. Guess I'll just have to save up for awhile and hit a comp shop.

Well, look on the bright side, getting the newer/faster hardware will allow you to run newer games and you'd be able to move to multi-core CPU support. Single core becomes more and more obsolete every day so you'd be better off in the long run anyways. Save your pennies!

 

[Tedster]

the fastest processor for your board is an Athlon XP 3200+ (single core).
That board is quite old. If you're going to spend more than $300 - get a new system. working XP 3200+ CPUs are getting harder to find nowadays. The XP series chips were known to be very overclockable - particularly the 2500+ series. The 3200+ runs hot - so I don't recommend doing that if you do indeed replace the cpu. You will also need a fast AGP card if you intend on playing games. The AGP is a dying format. But there are still some decent cards out there. The 7800 GS is a decent card system in AGP format. There are a couple of newer ones, but the performacne bang isn't much more due to the fact AGP is limited in bandwidth.