Hi all,
I last upgraded my motherboard/cpu/memory about a year ago and was thinking about changing these items for new ones, I have a P4 3.06 800FSB socket 478 cpu, ABIT AV7 mobo and a gig of 3200 memory.
Although im ok with PC hardware upgrading im no expert and looking at items now I see theres alot of new stuff on the market and things seemed to have changed quickly i.e. PCI express and alot of choice in cpu's.
I want to stay with Pentium so was wonder what is a good cpu and mobo, i see that there is socket 478/754/A/775/939/940 so what is the best to get also would like atleast a gig of 4200 memory. if you have any ideas let me know, also do you know any good sites to get this stuff off? I normally uses overclockers.co.uk, aria.co.uk or dabs.com
Cheers Steve

Firstly, when you say you want to stick with Pentium, what you mean is you want to still with Intel. Intel's current generation socket is LGA775. Socket A, 754, 939 and 940 are all AMD sockets. Socket 478 has been phased out.

Nearly all LGA775 motherboards have PCI-Express (with the exception of LGA775/i865 hybrids such as the ASUS P5P800). By "4200" I presume you mean DDRII-533/PC2-4200 RAM. All chipsets based on i915 (Grantsdale) and later support DDRII, but many low end lack DDRII slots; in these cases, DDR400/PC3200 is the standard. In reality, there is not great advantage to DDRII over DDR. The clock rates and maximum theoretical bandwidth is offset by the high latencies.

I would personally recommend that you go and talk to real human beings, who have knowledge and experience custom designing systems to people's needs and offering tangible support, rather than a staff of no-nothing don't-give-a-damn on-line store operators.