[CentOS] OT: (a) Biostar or MSI mainboard? (b) all Celeron CPU's OK?

[John R Pierce]

Lanny Marcus wrote:
> (a) Mark (mhr) suggested I buy a bare bones box, when I reported the
> problem with the mainboard in this Dell Dimension 2400 box. ... The one that
> seems the most interesting is the Biostar P4M890-M7 TE (a Socket LGA
> 775 board). ...
>
> The other mainboard is the MSI P6NGM-L (MS-7366 Ver. 1.0)....
>   

the PSU in your Dimension 2400 (a celeron system with the i845gv 
chipset) may not work with a PCI-Express motherboard as they've changed 
hte PSU spec to require significantly more +12V than in older ATX 
designs.   Also, Dell is fairly notorious for using PSUs that are just 
barely adequate for the system as originally configured.

if you are going to try to upgrade/replace parts in that system, I'd 
consider getting a g33 based motherboard (intel dg33tl or equivalent) 
with a low end core2 chip such as the e2200, along with 2x1GB ddr2 533 
or whatever.     this would give you a system many times faster than the 
celeron 2.4ghz of the original, faster but similar onboard video, etc.   
you may end up needing a new PSU for this, but this combination would 
work with a very modest pci-express compatible PSU

fwiw, my current main desktop system is a DG33TL mobo + e8500 cpu + 
2x2GB ddr2 800mhz, and its a seriously fast and stable system