Upgrade success story

I thought I would share with you all an upgrade success story that might be titled "there's life left in those old 423 pin P4 motherboards."I was one of the people who bought a first generation p4 chip, not knowing that Intel was going to change the socket in future versions of the chip. This severly limited the machine's upgradeability - as the 423 P4 chips top out at 2.0 gigs. So, I upgraded my 1.4 gig p4 (its a Dell Dimension 8100) to a p4 1.9 and pretty much thought that was it. Not so. Last weekend I installed a Powerleap socket adapter, available for just over $50, and a new 2.6 gig 400 mhz fsb Pentium 4 ($200 apx) into the box. The performance increase was noticeable. With a Ti 4200 video card and 764 megs of Ram, I say performance increase by about 25% in MSFS 2002. Not bad at all for $260.00. I then added a Radeon 9700 pro (bought on E-Bay for $265 inc. shipping) and I have to admit, have been overwhelmed. Performance at busy airports is up dramatically. Where I used to get 14 fps at KPDX on the active, using the very nice scenery package over at flightsim.com and about 40% AI with most of Project AI's installer packages on board, with clear skies (ok, not so realistic!), I now get close to 20 - and am up to 25 (locked) as soon as I'm off the runway. Clouds also ground my system to a halt. Now performance is much more acceptable - with no drops into single digits in partly cloudy skies. So, you can breathe new life into your old 423 pin P4 system! Compare the $520 I spent with a new machine at between $1,500 and $2,000 for a new HT pentium at 2.8 or 3.0. and this route looks better and better. And, you don't have to throw away that perfectly good RAMBUS memory - which you likely paid through the nose for as I did. RAMBUS still rates very high in speed. As I understand it, the computer makers didn't like it because of cost. Best, Colin