DescentBB

Well, looks my my mother board has bitten the dust and it's time to upgrade since finding a slot 1 motherboard is a bit of a problem these days. Presently I have a dysfunctional Abit II Rev 2 motherboard, 3 ATA 100 hard drives, 512 Mb Dimms memory, Voodoo 5 5500 video card, Soundblaster live sound card, Pentium III 750mhz and various PCI cards. (network, firewire). Oh yes, I also use and would hate to part with the good ol' Sidewinder 3d Pro of which I have several backups. I'd like to move to a Pentium 4 2.0mhz+ processor and still be able to use as many of the old components as possible, especially the 3d Pro and video card. I'd appreciate any suggestions of processor, motherboard and operating system. If the operating system is Windows XP what are the best drivers for the Voodoo 5? Or should I dump the Voodoo 5 at this point and move on? Thanks for your help as always

Everyone that posts will give you some idea of what they think you should do. So try to balance what you hear.

On the other hand, if you just want to get the thing back up and running on the cheap, you can get a board here: http://store.yahoo.com/justdeals/sl1mo.html

That P3B board for 15 bucks was a pretty swanky board in the day if I remember correctly

Dump the voodoo5, get at least a 2.4 P4, 2.8 would probably be a better deal. You could get a Athlon XP or Athlon 64 and get all of the power for almost half the price. You are going to have to replace your memory anyway in favor of DDR, get 1 GB. If you want insane video power get a x800pro or 6800GT, if you don't need that much video power get a GF4 TI or FX 5700 Ultra. Get a motherboard with built in LAN, firewire and audio (Nforce3 250 GB or Nforce2 ultra 400 GB chipsets would do nicely for Athlon platforms). The only thing you would need the crappy soundblaster for is the gameport to plug in the 3dpro.