Upgrade to Athlon XP = bad move?

[leadfish]

I've been seriously thinking about upgrading my *cough* beast *cough* of a system:

P3 733MHz (running at 790),
512MB SDRAM,
Radeon 9200SE,
MSI MoBo (not sure what model)

to:

Athlon XP 2800+
512MB DDR RAM, then to 1024MB DDR RAM when I have the cash
<insert good, compatible MoBo here>
*** video card when I can raise the funds ***

I just read in a thread that Athlon XP chips will not be supporting PCIE, so I'm starting to wonder about the wisdom of my current choices. I can't afford to upgrade very often, so this system will need to last for a good few years at least. So firstly, seeing as Athlon's won't be supporting PCIE, is this road a perilous one, or am I being paranoid about it? Also, could someone suggest a good/compatible MoBo for an Athlon XP 2800+ please.

Thanks for the help :thumbs:

 

[Asus]

Your fine.
The Athlon XP is a very mature and stable platform. Lot of value yet a good deal of performance too.

If you bought a P4 or A64 system today, you would still have to buy new parts again to get PCI Express.
It's a non-issue.

PCI is long from dead (thousands of PCI cards out there and many more to come) and PCI Express will take a long time before it even starts to be mainstream over PCI.
These are the last AGP cards but doubtful you will need anything beyond these without upgrading a system further.

 

[DiSTuRbEd]

PCI Express is looking @ 6 months to a full year to be released they are making sure it works right haha. But yes the XP processors are worth it, I have 2, 2200+ and 2600+ love them both, work great ingames.

 

[Direwolf]

I just upgraded to a 3000+ from a 2600 simply because I could drop it in and go . Didn't have any problems, and its gonna be more than adequate for a long while.

 

[leadfish]

Cool, thanks for the help there fellas, it's greatly appreciated...Now, I must fundraise!

 

[Johan_Tayn]

You could run AGP 4x without any(give or take 2-3 FPS) drop in performance. Simply put, you don't *NEED* PCIE OR SATA(however, they do have hotswap). So a 2800+ would do fine in HL2. After all, Gabe said you wouldn't see any great performance leap from 2.0ghz to 3.0ghz. So if you have 1.2Ghz+ and a Radeon 9800 Pro+, you are good.