Athlon 64 works with winXP home and other exciting questions.

[Jonslice]

These are probably questions that have been asked, and answered, somewhere on this forum before I just wasn't able to find it in the search so here it goes....


I am about to upgrade my home desktop which is used for graphic design/web dev. It's currently about 4 years and has the following specs.

800 duron
~380 MB PC133
2 hard drives totaling about 160GB, both ATA
nVidia Gforce 2 64MB DDR
cd-rom
cd/rw
etc...


So, my problem is I think my mobo is about to go out, a lot of capaciters look very swollen and I have a strange start-up hangup going on as well as performance issues. I essentially just want to upgrade to have something up to today's standards of technology.

I have my eye on a couple MSI/Athlon 64 combos for sale at tigerdirect.com.
The 2 options, at this point, are:
MSI K8TNeo2-F Via Socket 939 ATX Motherboard and AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor
MSI RS480M2-IL ATI Socket 939 MicroATX Motherboard and AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor


My questions for you, the hardware experts, are:
1. Will I need to get windoesXp x64 edition to take advantage of the athlon 64 in apps such as photoshop and dreamweaver?

2. Will my standard ATA harddrives work with the Serial ATA of these, and apparently all new motherboards and how will the RAID of the first linked board effect my setup?

3. If I do get the second board which has PCI express, what is a good, lower priced, graphics card that I could replace my current AGP card with? (remember this is not a gaming rig, no super-duper-mega 3d graphics are needed, about the only game I play every once and a while is starcraft)

4. ANY other suggestions you folks that know more about this current technology can give me with regard to brands, standards, whatever...



Ok, so there are my questions, I hope someone here can help me out.


thanks
Jon.

 

[Trifid]

1. Yes, but you will need to have 64bit apps, and there aren't many of them. Also windows 64bit is buggy (All MS products are) so you can still just get normal XP, and upgrade soon, for the price of delivery on the MS site.

2. The motherboards will have IDE connectors to connect them. If you want RAID, you will need to instal the drivers at start-up.

3. 6200/X300 will be fine for it.

4. You may want to get Intel pentium 4 instead as you are not gaming.

 

[Jonslice]

1. Yes, but you will need to have 64bit apps, and there aren't many of them. Also windows 64bit is buggy (All MS products are) so you can still just get normal XP, and upgrade soon, for the price of delivery on the MS site.

2. The motherboards will have IDE connectors to connect them. If you want RAID, you will need to instal the drivers at start-up.

3. 6200/X300 will be fine for it.

4. You may want to get Intel pentium 4 instead as you are not gaming.

Thanks for the replay.
On the RAID issue, I don't really want/need raid and i'm a bit worried about how it will work with my harddrives, one is a 40GB which has system/program files and the other is 100+GB for docs, pics, etc. If I set these drives up in a RAID configuration won't I only have storage equal to the smallest drive?

 

[Jonslice]

Another general question. What are some good websites to buy mobo/processor combos?