Over the Christmas holiday, I decided to upgrade my old 500Mhz AMD K6-2 system. I had purchased a PC-Chips 810LR motherboard and AMD 1200 Mhz Duron from EconoPC for $70.00. If you are not familiar with this board, it only has two PCI slots, 1 AGP slot and on-board LAN, sound and VGA. It is based on the Sis730S chipset and supports AMD Duron through XP processors. My decision to use this board was also influenced by my aging Voodoo Banshee video card. I simply did not have the money to order a new CPU, motherboard and video card and I couldn't see buying a new motherboard/cpu and still using the old video card. So, while it may not be suitable for heavy duty server use, with only two PCI (and an AGP) slot, for desktop and development use, it works quite well (particularly if you are on a very limited budget).
After installing the system board in the case, I connected my existing CD-ROM, Hardrives and floppy to the motherboard connectors. I was curious as to what would happen if I simply powered the computer on, and so I did. I dual boot, so first I tried Windows. It would not boot, except into safe mode, and failed to even find the second IDE controller (it was still using the old driver files for IDE and video). To my surprise, booting into Mandrake 9.0, everything came up great, except for X-Windows (which I didn't expect it to). A quick reconfigure of the X-Server for the new video and everything was running normal. I was really impressed that Mandrake found all the new devices and reconfigured itself so smoothly. I had already decided that I was going to reformat the drives and reinstall both Windows and Mandrake, so I did that next. I started with Windows and it was a headache, to say the least. To make a long story short, it took about 2.5 hours from start to finish on installing Windows and the applications I wanted to use. This included six reboots during driver installs. The Mandrake install, on the other hand, went smoothly and flawlessly. Mandrake automatically detected and installed the correct drivers for the built in video and lan. From start to finish, it took about 35 minutes and that included installing and configuring my applications and restoring my home directory! Overall, I am extremely pleased with the upgrade. Boot time on this computer is in the neighborhood of 10 seconds. I boot directly to an X login (kdm) and to launch KDE takes about another 8 seconds. Everything loads very quickly (Mozilla takes about three seconds). Well, everything but OpenOffice.org, which still takes some time. My old 500Mhz system would take about 45 seconds to boot and about another 30 for KDE to load. In additions, I have not run into any compatibility problems. In short, I would like to say that if you are looking for a low-cost system board/cpu and don't require a lot of expansion slots, you may want to check out the PC Chips 810LR. Joeb
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