Thinking about an MSI P4 board. Need help please!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rich Heimlich
  • Start date Start date
R

Rich Heimlich

I currently own an Athlon-based Soyo board I'm happy with and in the past I've
been an A-bit fan (not in a while though) and have never owned an MSI board.

Based on the recent Tom's Hardware round-up I was thinking of getting and MSI
865PE. I believe all I need is the NEO2 LS version. I only really needs USB and
Lan connectors. Firewire, RAID, Promise are all wasted with me so I don't
believe I need anything beyond the LS.

Also, is there any reason to consider the NEO based on the 875?

What RAM (manufacturer and speed) should I be looking to? In the past I've had
great luck with Crucial ram. I would have just gotten 512mb. Should I look to at
least 1GB now?

Am I likely to find this move to be very stable? I don't really care too much
about overclocking. I might push the system a tiny bit but not much. Mainly want
it to improve my performance in Flight Sim 2004 from my Athlon XP 1800+ system.

Figured I might be able to get in and out around $500.

Lastly, I used to FAT32 and in the past I just hooked up my new components to my
old hard drive, booted to a command prompt, renamed the Windows directory to
say, winold and then installed the OS again from a directory that had the CD's
copied to it. Fast and efficient. I recently converted the main partition to
NTFS at the heavy recommendation of nearly everyone I know. I'm uncomfortable
with this as I now have NO clue how to go about re-installing the OS (XP Pro
which I own).

Do I just boot the CD and install over the same directory after replacing the
motherboard/processor/ram?

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

*** RTH ***
 
I bought a combo, P4 2.4 gig and an MSI 645e Max with a SIS chip set,
several months ago. I installed Win XP Pro. It hasn't skipped a beat so far.
 
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