Feels strange... I'm usually the one trying to help people with computer questions. 
It's a sad day when a computer found in the garbage is faster than your system. Came across a Compaq in a dumpster over the weekend, so I grabbed it. Someone had dumped charcoal ashes on it, but I managed to salvage the 30gig hard drive, 640MB PC133 ram, the motherboard and the Duron 900 cpu. The ashes ruined the CD and floppy drives, so I chucked them along with the case.
I play World of Warcraft religiously now, and have been doing so on a P3-650@750, 512MB PC133 ram, and before my GF3 was handed down to me, a GeForce 256. Suffice it to say, even the Duron system was an upgrade.
A little mixing and matching of parts from my other systems yielded a Duron 900 with 1GB ram, Geforce3 and a 30gb hard drive. A nice bump in cpu speed and doubling of ram helped a little with World of Warcraft playability, but the Compaq motherboard is a piece of crap. It's running the ram and FSB at 100mhz, and it can't be changed. It's only saving grace is that it supports large amounts of ram, where my other boards are limited to 512mb, which is the main reason I'm using it. Performance is about the same thanks to the slow bus speed, but the extra ram helps greatly.
So to finally get to my question, I'm looking to upgrade the motherboard and possibly the CPU for as cheaply as possible, but I don't want to (can't at the moment) shell out for more/different ram. So I'm trying to find out what the fastest processor/mobo is that I can get from ebay or other sources that still runs with PC133 ram?
It's a sad day when a computer found in the garbage is faster than your system.
Came across a Compaq in a dumpster over the weekend, so I grabbed it. Someone had dumped charcoal ashes on it, but I managed to salvage the 30gig hard drive, 640MB PC133 ram, the motherboard and the Duron 900 cpu. The ashes ruined the CD and floppy drives, so I chucked them along with the case.I play World of Warcraft religiously now, and have been doing so on a P3-650@750, 512MB PC133 ram, and before my GF3 was handed down to me, a GeForce 256. Suffice it to say, even the Duron system was an upgrade.
A little mixing and matching of parts from my other systems yielded a Duron 900 with 1GB ram, Geforce3 and a 30gb hard drive. A nice bump in cpu speed and doubling of ram helped a little with World of Warcraft playability, but the Compaq motherboard is a piece of crap. It's running the ram and FSB at 100mhz, and it can't be changed. It's only saving grace is that it supports large amounts of ram, where my other boards are limited to 512mb, which is the main reason I'm using it. Performance is about the same thanks to the slow bus speed, but the extra ram helps greatly.
So to finally get to my question, I'm looking to upgrade the motherboard and possibly the CPU for as cheaply as possible, but I don't want to (can't at the moment) shell out for more/different ram. So I'm trying to find out what the fastest processor/mobo is that I can get from ebay or other sources that still runs with PC133 ram?
