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Well it's been almost 4 years since I last did a major upgrade of my machine. I recently saw a few screenshots of Half-Life 2 and decided that would be a good excuse to put a little money into the system. About a year ago I acquired a Radeon 9500 Pro for really cheap, however the rest of my system is nowhere nearly fast enough to take advantage of it. I have done a lot of research on various sites and have come across the following parts that I will be upgrading:

-Athlon XP 64 3000+ Socket 939: The 64 and 939 socket seem to offer the best performance at the current time. I would spend about $100 more versus an older XP 2500+ overclocked to 3200 speeds.
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDe ... ory=BROWSE

-NVidia NForce3 Ultra Chipset: I found a barebones Gigabyte board (GA-K8NS-939) for a great price. I don't need IEE1394 or 8 channel audio or dual RJ45 ports. This seems to fit my needs quite well.
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDe ... ory=BROWSE

-Mushkin PC3200 DDR: I found this for $132 at newegg. Will the PC3200 be operating at the correct frequency (400mhz) for the Athlon 3000?
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDe ... ory=BROWSE

I would like to get by with simply these upgrades. Does everything look like it will work together? Any suggestions on something that would provide a better bang for the buck?

I remember hearing talk back in the early P4 days of a special PSU for them, requiring a secondary connector. Do the Athlons need this also? I noticed a small 4 pin connector on the board I listed above. Is this the special connector? I currently have an awesome Antec 300W PS that I bought about 5 years ago. It only has one main 20? pin ATX connector. I would like to keep it if possible.

Also will my soundcard present any kind of issues? It's an original SB-Live Value. Still works fine but I don't want it to be a bottleneck.

Does everything look like it will work together?

Nothing stands out as a potential problem.

Will the PC3200 be operating at the correct frequency (400mhz) for the Athlon 3000?

Yep.

I remember hearing talk back in the early P4 days of a special PSU for them, requiring a secondary connector. Do the Athlons need this also?

Yes, Athlon64 boards need the "Pentium 4" (ATX12V) power supply.

Also will my soundcard present any kind of issues? It's an original SB-Live Value. Still works fine but I don't want it to be a bottleneck.

A lot of current games (Doom 3, HL2) have their own software sound engines. Therefore, unless you're using something like EAX then the soundcard should have little to no effect on performance. In fact, the integrated sound on that motherboard will probably work just as well as the Live in terms of performance. Can't speak to quality, though.

the old 300w power sources doesn't have the needed 4-pin and it doesn't have enough juice either...make sure you upgrade to 1 gig of ram while you are at it...and brand name value line (like mushkin) will be fine if you're not overclocking....the 9500 pro will let you run just about anything for now...you won't be able to play at 12x16 with all the eye candy, but you shouldn't have any issues

Thanks for the help guys. How overclockable will this system be? According to Anandtech's 3 part article on Half-Life 2 performance 1.8GHz should just about max out my video card so the 3000 should be a good match at stock speeds. In spite of this what kind of success are people getting when overclocking these Athlon 64s? How high is the PC3200 ram usually good for?

Also any recommendations on cases/powersupplies? Newegg's got a literal TON of them.

if you're getting a socket 939 they are supposed to have a good deal of head room - but remember you will be overclocking by lowering the multi and increasing the FSB - some pc3200 doesn't have a whole lot of headroom tho it's fine at 200 fsb - it will also depend somewhat on your motherboard and the options available for overclocking there

I honestly would not recommend overclocking modern systems. It's just not worth it. These systems have VERY critical memory timing and overclocking can throw this off easily causing data corruption.

Someone else on this forum had that happen on a new system and it trashed his OS install.

The slight performance you'd be gaining would not be noticable at the speeds these systems run at, and the added instability could come back and bite you at a bad moment.

If you overclock anything, I'd play with the video card. You have some room to play with and some more performance to realize - just make sure you have addequate cooling and raise your clock GRADUALLY.

Originally posted by FlyingPenguin
I honestly would not recommend overclocking modern systems. It's just not worth it. These systems have VERY critical memory timing and overclocking can throw this off easily causing data corruption.

Someone else on this forum had that happen on a new system and it trashed his OS install.

The slight performance you'd be gaining would not be noticable at the speeds these systems run at, and the added instability could come back and bite you at a bad moment.

If you overclock anything, I'd play with the video card. You have some room to play with and some more performance to realize - just make sure you have addequate cooling and raise your clock GRADUALLY.

I hear ya. I just gave Newegg $500 and I don't think it'll be exceeding the stock speeds for a while.

BTW, ended up going with the Antec SLK3700AMB case w/SL350 PSU.