If you just drop the Celeron and find a standard pentium (same clock), you probably will be surprised with the improvement in performance. I did just that in the past (think it was celeron 400mhz/pentium 400 mhz) and the leap was unbelievable...
Good luck
JTelles

CuzinB - I had someone try to steer me toward an Asus/AMD 2200 combo, which I believe was somewhere in the $300 range. I can accept that, unless of course I'm lead to believe by the more informed that this is poopoo...

larryo,
Check the reviews on tomshardware and elsewhere, put together your dream system whether it be Pentium or AMD, then hang out on eBay until it comes up at a price you can afford. Be patient, the deals you can get on "barebones" systems will amaze you. For instance, I got an Abit raid, retail XP 2100+, and 512 of pc3200 for $320 and shipping. The seller was supportive and it works great.

I suggest you let your 133 ram live peacefully in your old machine, which you can keep as an internet or office machine, or give it to a school or nonprofit. And be sure to get new ATA100 hard drives.

LarryO,

ASUS make excellent boards. I have the P4B533-V in my main machine and it smokes. I have built three boxes in 3 years...all with ASUS. They make a great board.

Cuzin B

I'm very happy with my new MSI Nvidia NForce2 motherboard, 512MB CAS 2 DDR400, and AMD Athlon XP 2400+

Fingers crossed... so far very very fast, and no glitches or problems.

Projects running on my 1700+ maxxed out now run on the new machine at around 56% processor.

Gotta be pleased with that!

Jason

<<I'm very happy with my new MSI Nvidia NForce2 motherboard, 512MB CAS 2 DDR400, and AMD Athlon XP 2400+>>

What soundcard are you running with this system?

Thanks,

drbam

2x M-Audio Delta 1010

"If you just drop the Celeron and find a standard pentium (same clock), you probably will be surprised with the improvement in performance. I did just that in the past (think it was celeron 400mhz/pentium 400 mhz) and the leap was unbelievable...
Good luck
JTelles "

After much debate and wallet inventory, I decided to take this suggestion. I found a PIII/1 gig for a good price and just don't want to deal with the down time of a new system re-vamp right now. I got to believe that with a Celeron 600 to PIII/1gig swap, I should get what I want/need for my apps. My next $$ decision will likely be new board & AMD processor vs Win XP (currently using 98SE). If I'm happy with the P3 upgrade, I might be inclined to go for XP 1st. Any thoughts on what would be the next best purchase?

<< My next $$ decision will likely be new board & AMD processor vs Win XP (currently using 98SE). If I'm happy with the P3 upgrade, I might be inclined to go for XP 1st. Any thoughts on what would be the next best purchase? >>

I would get the P3 up and running and see where you are at that point. Your next purchase priority may become pretty clear then.

drbam

... a lot of people seem to be having problems with the Pentium 4 platform and audio at the moment, I'd recommend AMD for the meantime!

Try Asus a7n8x delux motherboard and AMD Athlon 2800+ combination. This is not too costly for all tis offerring including a superb Dolby 5.1 encoder and decoder, support for 6 USB2 ports, firewire ports and high speed SATA for future hard disks. Performance and upgradability is excellent.

One point here is that your current memory sticks will not work ,and you will need to buy DDR memory, but i guess yo ushoul dbe able to sell your memory.

Also note that there are two companies competeting for the processor market which are Intel and AMD. AMD is better suited for multimedia work and it's processor with speed equal to that of Pentium 4 is about 5 times cheaper!!

In my private opinion, AMD are a bunch of overclocking no-good customer-ignorant B*STARDS who can't build processors for shit. But never mind that. I give you example A:

Early last year, we bought 20 working stations equipped with dual AMD 1000's and enough fans to start a hurricane for our artists. 19 of them was sent back the week after since there was no possible way of making those computers stable. We patched and flashed the mobo's until our eyes were green, we tried umpteen different sound / graphics / network cards, did a 65536-pass memory check which took better part of a working day... But it was all in the goddamn AMD processors. Crap. Utter crap. Almost the same thing happened next time, with dual AMD 1400's, at least when you started WORKING on them instead of just playing back two simultaneous pr0n-divX'es in windowed mode, which seems to be the customary metaphor for "high performance". Bah.

We're now going to Xeons, and haven't had a single processor / mobo-related crash during our two-month test drive. I know what my choice will be if it's stability I'm after.

On the other hand, if you can afford to lose the occasional two hour's work and just need a cheap bang for your buck, you'll be happy as... something very happy. The AMD's are faster than anything I've seen, but they certainly put a face on the term "crash and burn"...

I would have to agree with Johan concerning the AMD. Without the anger, though (I didn't have 20 screwed up workstations). Very few of the hardware products that you'll add to your machine are built within the AMD guidelines (they are all built to intel's S&Gs). The AMD processors and chipsets may work well in some environments, but in others, may cause major frustration.

The P3 is cool as long as it's not the 845 chipset.

TMR

Hey JohanAlthoff,

I have been an Intel user since childhood, and have only recently swiched to AMD VERY hesitatingly. Infact this is my first ever AMD based board. I am basically a software developer. I have done video encoding, heard music, watched DVDs, run Dreamweaver MX, Photoshop and internet explorer together, run apache mysql servers, frameserved videos etc. I am not much into gaming but have run WarcraftIII, NFS hot persuit etc. fantastically. In short i have no crashes or any problems at all. Have run 3ds max 5 too.

Well, it IS surprising that you had such a bitter expereience with not one but 20 AMD units. tmrpro is correct in saying that most assemblers, vendors are in habit of building intel systems and may not know the finer points of assembleing a powerhouse like AMD. I presume you bought the 20 units from a single vendor. May i suggest trying 1 pc from another vendor?

2 major points to remember in an AMD pc.
1) AMD needs enough power. Please do not think below 350 true power output on the SMPS. Also, the 12v rail and 5v rails i nthe smps need to have enough power.
2) AMD gets hot! So you may like to monitor its temperature for the first few days and take measures to keep the temperature of the processor < 60-65 centigrade.

Sometimes the shipped battery on the motherboard is a bit old and hence not fresh. Just replacing it with a new battery which measures 3.3V can do lots of goods to the stability.

Hope this helps.

Hey JohanAlthoff,

I have been an Intel user since childhood, and have only recently swiched to AMD VERY hesitatingly. Infact this is my first ever AMD based board. I am basically a software developer. I have done video encoding, heard music, watched DVDs, run Dreamweaver MX, Photoshop and internet explorer together, run apache mysql servers, frameserved videos etc. I am not much into gaming but have run WarcraftIII, NFS hot persuit etc. fantastically. In short i have no crashes or any problems at all. Have run 3ds max 5 too.

Well, it IS surprising that you had such a bitter expereience with not one but 20 AMD units. tmrpro is correct in saying that most assemblers, vendors are in habit of building intel systems and may not know the finer points of assembleing a powerhouse like AMD. I presume you bought the 20 units from a single vendor. May i suggest trying 1 pc from another vendor?

2 major points to remember in an AMD pc.
1) AMD needs enough power. Please do not think below 350 true power output on the SMPS. Also, the 12v rail and 5v rails i nthe smps need to have enough power.
2) AMD gets hot! So you may like to monitor its temperature for the first few days and take measures to keep the temperature of the processor < 60-65 centigrade.

Sometimes the shipped battery on the motherboard is a bit old and hence not fresh. Just replacing it with a new battery which measures 3.3V can do lots of goods to the stability.

Hope this helps.

ALso, WAIT till all couple more processing platforms or processors come out, then the one you want now will be less than a c-note, uh, if you stick with AMD, i.e., if you want a 2.4 now wait till end of this year, etc...usually if you wait for at least a couple of new chips to come out for public consumption, the one you want now will be worth the wait, then put the savings into memory, or hard drives, or whatever...

I've had three AMD machines, and ZERO problems with any of them. Now NVidia is making chipsets for them, I think they're even more stable.

Just make sure it's a good motherboard and powersupply. I've seen far more people with problems using a P4, especially relating to audio!

Jason

<<... a lot of people seem to be having problems with the Pentium 4 platform and audio at the moment, I'd recommend AMD for the meantime!>>

bwahahahhaa....

This is nonsense, the reverse is more likely the case.
On the whole, you're better off staying intel/intel with a DAW.

JoeD

<<Well, it IS surprising that you had such a bitter expereience with not one but 20 AMD units>>


Uhh, no it isn't. I ran a lab of 100+ systems and if yu could have seen the numerous problems with AMD systems, well you too would have you're own solid conclusions.

I strongly advise staying Intel/Intel, especially with a DAW. AMD CAN work and I DO NOT dislike AMD (built many). They are fine for the biz app/gamer/web authors, etc but when we're talking DAW's or A/V systems...Intel/Intel is the smarter route.

And I don't want to hear about $ differneces now, a lot has changed in that area.

JoeD

One of the reasons I've stayed away from rolling my own is fan noise. I have a few year old Dell and it is VERY quiet. I find doing audio with fan noise very anoying.

Comments?

Larry

I have to agree to the post earlier about AMD vs. Intel. I built my first AMD box a couple of years ago and have had insane stability problems. Keep in mind that the occassional crash is fine for a game box. But when you crash for the 3rd time in the middle of an 8 hour render job, you will know hell. For stability keep with Intel chips (don't have to do Xeons cause the extra cache is not that big of a performance booster) and keep with Intel chipsets. I recently went through 2 mobos that had non-intel chips and had to troubleshoot BSOD's all day.

Oh the AMD vs. Intel argument again. I won't get into this one this time. With the blubbering idiot JoeD/Angelica supporting Intel, that's enough to make me use AMD for the rest of my life. Although my 700Mhz Athlon1 still is 10 times more stable and even faster than my 900Mhz PIII.

"Optimally, I'd like to be able to achieve up to 24 audio tracks at 24/44.1 with a reasonable amount of plugins running. Appreciate any advice. Larry"

If saving cash is your main objective....obviously it must be, since you want to keep those PC133 sticks....then disregard ALL the Intel vs. AMD arguments.

You should be able to EASILY achieve that with the system you have. I don't run a lot of plugins on my mixes, but with my 700Mhz AMD Athlon I'm able to record and playback 70 simultaneous tracks at 16bit/44.1Khz....NO Plugins ran during this test. What you need is more RAM for those plugins. I recently picked up 2-512Meg PC133's for a total of $65 bucks and added that to my current 128 Meg stick. Goto WWW.PRICEWATCH.COM and check out the prices. Now my total Ram is at 1.1 Gig of PC133. Prior to this I tested the same system with only the 128Meg of RAM and got a track count of 42. The only thing that changed in this system was that I added a GIG of RAM and upgraded from Win98SE to WinXP and got 28 more tracks!! Plugins, are RAM hungry and also need a good floating point arithmatic processor. Right now with your current system you have neither and is where you are hitting the brick wall/bottle neck. Celerons don't have the L1/L2 cache and don't have the floating point arithamic power like a Pentium or Athlon processor. You don't have a high goal for your system, and for 60-75 bucks you could easily achieve it. Unless you rather listen to the AMD vs. Pentium arguments for the rest of your life. Another thing to do is to get AT LEAST a 7200RPM EIDE66 and MAKE SURE "DMA is enabled" on it. If you're running a 5500RPM, then that's another bottleneck in your current system and if the DMA is not enabled that is a HUGE bottle neck for plugins and system performance.