SW-SSG wrote:That spec looks very similar to the machine my family bought at the end of 2002 -- except ours had a T-bred 1700+ (1.47GHz), an ECS K7S5A motherboard, an SiS 305 32MB graphics card (that I still have), and a 40GB 7200RPM Maxtor HDD. Clearly 3D stuff of any kind was not a priority for ours.
Mine was an original Palomino Athlon XP, an 1800+ running at 1.54 GHz. I still have that CPU on my shelf, but now I have a Barton Athlon XP 3200+, running 2.3GHz.
It originally had 256MB of DDR-233 RAM, but once XP SP1 was released, it bogged down. I have since rectified that. It now carries 2GB (2x1GB modules) at DDR-400, running at 333 MHz speeds.
It originally had an ATI Radeon 7500 64MB AGP card, and it was pretty strong. But when it started glitching, I tried to "upgrade" to a 9550xl. Turns out...they're about equal in performance. >.< Now I want something better, like a 9800 Pro/XL or the x700 I have on my shelf that won't boot. Either the PCI-E<->AGP chip is causing the fault or my PSU needs more than the supplied 25 amps on the +5v rail. I want to pick up a new PSU, the Logisys PS575 which has 40 amps on the +5v rail. If it still doesn't POST, it's gotta be the chip, not the power delivery.
The motherboard started to have stability issues, but I traced that back to failing capacitors. I have since replaced all the caps - at a crazy expense, but it's now 100% rock-solid stable.
My thoughts about an Athlon build is just fine. If you have full AGP 8x speeds, then for that time period, I'd definitely consider the top-end for that era, which was ATI's Radeon line. It is my understanding that nVidia didn't surpass ATI in graphics hardware until the 6800 Ultra came out - the whole 6000 line, really.