I tried upgrading my old Media Center PC to Vista.
Turns out Vista doesn't support the Nforce2 chipset.
So I upgraded the machine. Here's what I got:

ABIT IB9 LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 Allendale 1.8GHz
GIGABYTE GV-NX76T256D-RH GeForce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card
Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC2-6400 800MHz 240-pin DDR2 Memory

Paid $350 including shipping after rebates.

Here's what I sold:

Abit NF7 Nforce 2 MB
Athlon XP 3000+
Silent Fan
2 1gb DDR chips

Sold them on ebay for $275.

So it cost me $75

Machine is much faster. I have NFS Underground that
played like crap on my old FX5200 agp card. Now I can
play it with max settings and it's smooth. One major
downfall is the Video card's silent heatsink sticks up
too far to allow the cover of my D-Vine case to go back
on. A real shitter. I have to figure this one out.


n2

Seems you got a pretty good deal. The cheapest I can find those parts on Newegg would be $415 after rebates/shipping. Sounds pretty sweet.

> I tried upgrading my old Media Center PC to Vista.
> Turns out Vista doesn't support the Nforce2 chipset.
> So I upgraded the machine. Here's what I got:

Acutally, although nVidia doesn't support it officially, there are drivers from MS that support the Nforce2 just fine afaik. However, multi-core is where it's at. I'm just looking at the sparsity of your rear io panel ;-) After getting an ASUS A7N8X-Deluxe (nforce2) I can't liver with out uber peripherals/connectivity. About the only port I don't use on the back of my PC is the parallel port.

I need coaxial spdif out, firewire, rs-232 comm ports, atleast 5.1 analog headphone jacks, etc... and finding all that on a mobo with a budget is hard (especailly when i have no interest in SLI).

I'm going to go with a ASRock 4CoreDual-VSTA. That way I can use my x1950Pro 512mb AGP card and DDR2 is so cheap I can snag 2gb of 800mhz stuff to replace my 1gb of DDR400. I'm going to need a cheap firewire pci card, but that's $10 and I'm going to have to hack a cable from the onboard spdif HDMI header to a spdif coaxial out, but that will be simple.

The only thing I'll be losing in the upgrade will be realtime dolby digital live encoding, but I'll guess I'll have to live with that.

I'm planning on snagging a e4400 (10x multiplier) with it and I'll need a new power supply, but I have Best Buy gift cards that are collecting dust that will cover that. Can't wait... :-D

_ _ - - = = Pr3tty F1y = = - - _ _

With that mobo you'll be able to upgrade just the cpu and videocard if you want and have a top of the line machine.

All work and no play makes me..., well, you know the rest.

Nice price slashing coming up, you'll be able to get a better cpu, which might help with HD movies and shows.

All work and no play makes me..., well, you know the rest.

But my comp is starting to flake out.

I know I *could* get the new power supply now and prolly solve some of my troubles (random reboots/freezes), but I really could use a reinstall of WinXP. I've had the same install for over 4 years and it's been great, but now it's starting to weird out on me like explorer sucking up 100% of cpu time and eating 500-600mb of ram when I open large-ish (300dpi) pictures. Prolly of some addon or prog I installed, but I really just don't want to track it down.

Plus I'm into getting eth0's WinXP Corporate + Updates ISO's. The latest is April 2007, and I have to say it's pretty sweet to reinstall WinXP and already have it up to date and simply work "better" than my current install (I installed it on my secondary PC).

The only thing I HATE is reinstalling all of my programs... basically I'm just going to have to take a day to do that...

_ _ - - = = Pr3tty F1y = = - - _ _

is that shit on your mobo? I'm going to be buying a new sound card soon just for that feature I had no idea that it had already been done! That shit is just perfect for a digital amp.

sound card link http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=7492

Basically, as far as digital out, it's all I've ever been accustomed too (being I built the PC in Feb 2003). Having it hooked up to my Harmon Kardon AVR500 is super nice (so nice that I have both my comp and my parents comp hooked up to it along with s-video outs from both comps so I can broadcast to my TV). From what I gather, without DDL (Dolby Digital Live!) or the DTS equivalent(I think it's DTS Connect), that the spdif out will only send LPCM stereo.

I guess I'll have to live with that for now, but listening to my MP3's on my home theater (yah, the audiophilles can gag) with DDL and having both the front and the rear speakers going at the same time + sub was nice (with optional center mixing, but I didn't use that). I guess I'll have to deal with only the fronts for a while :-(

I've been keeping an eye on the Auzentech X-Fi card for a while (their current lineup already does DD and DTS, afaik, just shitty EAX). ASUS is also coming out with their own DD/DTS soundcard called the Xonar.

Truthfully, although the Xonar is only EAX2.0, I'm considering it over any creative card and even the Auzentech Prelude because it's PCI Express and there are no other PCIe soundcards out there (at least decent ones). Plus who needs EAX if you got a 5.1 digital system pumping. True surround > surround effects. But that'll prolly have to wait for a full new PC (that I'm planning to build when Crysis comes out).

Plus the Xonar has a 1gips dsp compared to the 10,000mps dsp on the X-Fi. Although numbers are really useless without performance, it'll make your ePenis bigger.

_ _ - - = = Pr3tty F1y = = - - _ _

It's used by colleges in the classes where students learn to install and troubleshoot WinXP.

There is no activation/registration/serial/anything, and it updates perfectly. WGA reports it as being completely legit.

Another nice thing is that it's meant to be copied :^)



> But my comp is starting to flake out.
>
> I know I *could* get the new power supply now and prolly solve some of my
> troubles (random reboots/freezes), but I really could use a reinstall of WinXP.
> I've had the same install for over 4 years and it's been great, but now it's
> starting to weird out on me like explorer sucking up 100% of cpu time and eating
> 500-600mb of ram when I open large-ish (300dpi) pictures. Prolly of some addon
> or prog I installed, but I really just don't want to track it down.
>
> Plus I'm into getting eth0's WinXP Corporate + Updates ISO's. The latest is
> April 2007, and I have to say it's pretty sweet to reinstall WinXP and already
> have it up to date and simply work "better" than my current install (I installed
> it on my secondary PC).
>
> The only thing I HATE is reinstalling all of my programs... basically I'm just
> going to have to take a day to do that...
>
> _ _ - - = = Pr3tty F1y = = - - _ _
>

WGA is no longer an issue, any WinXP can be made legit.

_ _ - - = = Pr3tty F1y = = - - _ _

> WGA is no longer an issue, any WinXP can be made legit.
>
> _ _ - - = = Pr3tty F1y = = - - _ _
>

EAX is more about environmental sound effects not so much to do with surround effects. The difference in sound effect between EAX 2.0 and EAX HD is very noticeable. I don't think any of it matters anymore though with Vista not supporting EAX, Creative just have some hack going to get it working on the X-Fi but I don't know too much about it.

While reading wikipedia on the subject I did find this site http://www.driverheaven.net/general-discussion/106111-redocnexk-gui-version-released-realtime-5-1-ac3-encoder.html apparently it does realtime AC3 encoding in software I'll have to read a bit more on it and see what it's like.

here

_ _ - - = = Pr3tty F1y = = - - _ _

Here

Unless you prefer torrents to directories with files.





> here
>
> _ _ - - = = Pr3tty F1y = = - - _ _
>

> Here
>
> Unless you prefer torrents to directories with files.
>
>
>
>
>
> > here
> >
> > _ _ - - = = Pr3tty F1y = = - - _ _
> >
>
>
>
>


_ _ - - = = Pr3tty F1y = = - - _ _