I am running an Athlon 2400XP which has served me well, but now seems to be slower every day....

I'd like some ideas for an upgrade. I do periodically slog thru the CPU and MB specs, but I frankly find it a bit intimidating.

Here are my parameters:
No gaming
No video editing
Periodic photo editing, including some occassional big files (100MB or so)
Keep existing SATA drives
Keep exisitng PATA optical drives
Keep existing PCI video and sound cards, firewire card, etc.
RAID not required

I want a significant speed improvement, but it must be affordable. I am prepared to buy a new power supply.
I'm hoping for a total cost of around $300-400 US, including 2-4GB RAM and new PS.

(Oh yes, it needs to run Linux.....)

Hi,

I just received a email from tigerdirect for a special offer build 'AMD Quad core w/Asus MB' for under $200.00. Not to bad for what you get.

I'm still a bit confused on which PCI card slot standards are which, so I would find it challenging to select a new motherboard for existing PCI cards. If you really want to do that, make sure you understand which PCI standard is which.

I expect it would be easier and not significantly (if at all) more expensive to get video, sound and firewire built into the new motherboard with performance exceeding that of your old cards.

But for your main question: good price/performance for motherboard plus CPU plus ram in the 300$ range, I'm also no longer current with the relevant performance stats.

For power supply, check the max current rating for +12 on your existing supply. A newer CPU will probably need more than your old CPU, but it might still be well below what your old PSU provides, especially if you are dropping the video card in favor of motherboard graphics.

Modern gaming video cards need absurd amounts of +12 and a lot of the PSU market is aimed at supporting those. If you are using motherboard graphics or some less aggressive video card, your PSU requirements are far less.

Buy second hand? Your needs are relatively modest so you could buy a quality system from someone who is upgrading to the latest and greatest. The Athlon XP 2400 is seven years old so moving up to, say, a 4 year old two-core processor would speed things along nicely, come well within budget and get you a bunch of spares.

These days motherboards are moving away from PATA or IDE for SATA, so you will only get two IDE drives out of today's motherboards. Though you can still use PATA with a SATA by using a bridge card.

The following is an example what you could get and prices are from newegg.com.

MSI NF980-G65 AM3 NVIDIA nForce 980a SLI HDMI ATX
AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz
SeaSonic S12II-430B 430W
Crucial Ballistix 2GB (2 x 1GB) Model BL2KIT12864BA1336
Total: $357.97
or

MSI NF980-G65 AM3 NVIDIA nForce 980a SLI HDMI ATX
AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz
SeaSonic S12II-430B 430W
Crucial Ballistix 4GB (2 x 2GB) Model BL2KIT25664BA1336
Total: $379.97

or

MSI NF980-G65 AM3 NVIDIA nForce 980a SLI HDMI ATX
AMD Athlon II X2 250 Regor 3.0GHz
SeaSonic S12II-430B 430W
Patriot Viper II Sector 5 4GB (2 x 2GB) Model PVV34G1333LLK
Total:407.97

The motherboard includes IEEE-1394 or Firewire and nVidia graphics. The processor is a few times faster than your setup and that is only one core in the processor that I am comparing. It also comes with sound. The power supply is plenty even if you have a hand full of hard drives.

Another motherboard that I suggest is BIOSTAR TForce TA790GX A3+, but it uses ATI for graphics. A board that does not have on-board graphics is MSI 770-C45 that is cheap at $80 for its features. It needs a graphics card and you can use your existing Firewire card.

I suggest use something like XFX GeForce 9400 GT 1GB (PVT94GZAH2) as your graphics card if you are selecting motherboards with out on-board graphics. It is cheap around $50 and it provides you the ability to playback HD video if you want with the help of VDPAU.

Basically just about any motherboard will work. I suggest check the extras such as NIC and storage to make sure they are supported in Linux.

The following is my wish list for my next computer build when ever that will be to give an example.

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Pu...Number=8984714

I recommend upgrade to PCIe from your PCI graphics card because performance will suffer with a PCI graphics card. PCIe is PCI Express and it has higher bandwidth compared to AGP. AGP has higher performance than PCI.

I am running an Athlon 2700XP for my workstation, which puts me into the same performance class as you.

I have not found my system to be getting slow, except in situations involving bad software design - and there is a fair amount of that out there in Linux, and you won't fix it by buying a faster processor.

What, specifically, are you doing that is getting slow? And, what have you done to identify the specific problems and address them?

Of course, if you just want to upgrade, that is one thing. But if you are trying to address specific performance issues I suspect you'll get a lot further by changing some things in your system configuration.

For instance, I use kget as a downloader, but it seems to have some busy waits in it and sucks CPU. Firefox is not nearly as bad about leaking memory as it used to be, but it still is single threaded in places where it should be multi-threaded, which makes it appear dog slow on a lot of things. Amarok will update your music list every couple of minutes (sucking cpu AND hard drive cycles) unless you force it to stop doing that.

Frankly, I think a lot of the issues we see with apparent performance in Linux are simply the result of programmers who use timing loops instead of mutexes. This shouldn't be a surprise; conceptually timing loops are a lot easier. Easier to program, easier to debug. But they waste resources, and going with a faster computer won't help with that.