I have an older self built computer, it's specs are: 600mhz celeron asus socket 370 mobo 256mb ram 20gb hard drive dvd-rom I'm thinking about turning it into a gaming machine!!! As weird as it sound, i found a perfectly fine working 1.4ghz pentium 3 on the side of the road nib, and according to my mobo's documentation will work. The max memory is 1gb, and there are four slots, so if i slap in three more 256mb pc133 ram chips, i will have that gb. Then i can add in a X800gto agp 8X card (mobo supports agp 4x) Water cool the cpu with a cheap watergate cpu cooler. O/C it to 1.8ghz, i will have these specs: 1.8ghz Pentium 3 1gb pc133 ram (4X256mb) ATi Radeon X800gto 256mb gddr3 20gb hard drive dvd-rom drive What kind of games will i be able to play with this machine? Is it true that i can upgrade my almost 8 year old machine to play modern games for under $175? And when i say modern i don't mean like oblivion, i mean like, can i play half-life 2 or far-cry at resolutions like 800X600?

- a single stick of 256MB PC133 will run you about $30, so 3 x $30 = $90. And there's always the possibility that you'll run into the dreaded "denisty issue". - do you even know if your board/CPU will overclock as high as you hope? The best you're likely to do is increase the FSB to 112MHz...beyond that, the PCI bus will go too far out of spec, so your CPU will be running at about 1.57GHz. And water cooling would be a colossal waste of money. - IMO, the cost of the video card is too much for that old rig too. Actually it's really not worth investing anything into it. For $175, you'd be well on your way to building a *real* computer

Bad jam outrageous system overhauls on older machines always kicks butt, then one can assure themselfs that they did indeed futureproof their system for 6-7 years! and i did indeed!!! yes, if i can overclock my 600mhz celeron to 1ghz stable i am confident that i can overclock a 1.4ghz p3 to 1.8 especially if i have watercooling. I'm not getting a "real" computer until kentsfield vista and dx-10 come out, but for now, i think everyone can agree with me that my upgrade will kick butt considering it is on an almost 7 year old computer. And no, there is no way i could even possibly get a whole system even slightly suited for gaming for $175, or an different upgrade that doesn't include motherboard.

"yes, if i can overclock my 600mhz celeron to 1ghz stable i am confident that i can overclock a 1.4ghz p3 to 1.8 especially if i have watercooling." The celeron 600 is a low end P3 class CPU and 0.18nm Intel CPU max out at 1.13ghz, so going from 600 to 1000 should not be a hard thing to do, even with air cooling. However, 1400 P3 is the top CPU in P3 class @ 0.13nm, so going from 1.4 to 1.8 will be more difficult comparing going from 600 to 1000 with your celeron... Anyways.. 1. 1.4g CPU - $0 2. 3 stick of 256mb RAM on ebay - $75+ 3. Better PSU for x800___ agp - $50+ 4. x800____ agp $100+ Spending money on such old machine, hopeless... TMP-Man Asus P5P800-SE P4 506 @ 4200Mhz 1.45v Thermaltake CLP0024 w/ 1700RPM 92MM + AS5 1GB Corsair 2-3-3-5 DDR400 120GB/300GB 7200RPM HD MSI 6600GT AGP 550/1150

Sounds like fun but triple check that your machine can take the 1.4 as my old 933 would not take anything higher than the 1.2 (there was something slightly different about the 1.4 'Turon' I think... long time ago now!) The thing is, I upgraded from a 3200XP to a 3500AMD64 and noticed that SATA, a decent mb and fast ram made a huge difference, I think you HDD and ram will put limits on what you can do.

i got my upgrade today and it plays doom 3 and hl2 easily at 1024X768 with most options at medium!!!

heh thats what happens when people start talking about something that they really dont know anything about. AKA Foot in the mouth.