Hello again... My economic/performance hardware upgrade step from a P4 was to this motherboard an ASROCK 4CoreDual-SATA2... Socket 775 1066 Dual/Quad Intel processors.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/...?Model=4COREDUAL-SATA2 1) This board has both an AGP and PCI-X video slots... I used my old AGP card.
2) This board has both DDR and DDR2 memory slots... I used my old DDR memory.
3) This board has 4 IDE and 2 SATA connectors... I used my old IDE hard and optical drives.
4) This board has 7.1 Realtek ALC888 HD audio chip... no sound card needed.
5) This board has 10/100 LAN... no network card needed.
6) This board has 4 USB ports and 3 PCI slots and 4 GB max memory.
The only thing I bought was the motherboard and a Dual Core E6420 CPU... everything connected to the original power supply and case... currently I see prices listed at about $65 for the retail box motherboard, and I would consider watching EBAY for an E7400, an E6600, or a Q6600 CPU... all could be found for under $100... and are W7 64-bit ready... a huge XP performance boost.
You can then upgrade, at a later time, a SATA hardrive and back up important data... a PCI-X video card... and then that large eye candy LCD monitor... Windows 7... etc... and you will have Hardware compatible for your next i3, i5, and i7 system.
This website shows a performance graph of old and current CPU's...
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/common_cpus.html 3 of the 10 top performers are socket 775 processors... only 1 out of 10 is an i5...
post edited by IronSound - 2010/09/07 12:54:19