K8N Neo2 Plat Upgrades?

I have a K8N Neo2 Platinum with Athlon 3500+ and 1gb OZC Gold memory.

I want to know (relatively speaking) if the following upgrades make
sense:

Keep the mobo and change the cpu to an FX-55 and change the ram to 2gb
fast memory.

Would you do this? Leave it alone? or sell the components and build a
more modern system (quad core ddr2 - etc).

 

What do you intend to do with it?

 

well I have been using it as a DAW and would like to amp it up a bit -
but it must be very stable.

 

That is an intensive use which could benefit of an upgrade. In most
instances, WinXP (I'm making an assumption based on the age of your
machine) gains little from memory over 1Gig. Since DDR is relatively
expensive, the cost to performance increase ratio is pretty low.
However, you might benefit if your RAM usage in consistently high in
task manager.

You'll definitely gain from a processor upgrade. I recently put a dual
core of about the same speed as my single core in my Neo4 version of
your board. For $50 I got two horses pulling the cart at the same speed.
The upgrade matched my usage which is characterized by heavy
multi-tasking. If you are doing DAW with no other tasks, then I'd agree
that you'd benefit from the fastest single-core that'll fit.

On the other hand, if you have the scratch an upgrade is in your near
future anyway. However, if you are buying an off the shelf Vista machine
I'd wait until SP1 is released. Vista is all kinds of messed up.

'pider

 

so is the FX-55 the biggest/fastest cpu that the Neo2 will take?

and if you know these cpu's - what are the merits of the different
iterations - Clawhammer vs San Diego for example?

ps - I'd probably never buy and off the shelf computer (Apple or
anything else) as building them is too much fun.

pps - as an aside - my other machine: ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe - Athlon
64x2 3800+ - Corsair CMX512-6400XLPRO 1gb - totally smokes this Neo2
beast.

 

another possible cpu route I forgot to mention is the Opteron 175/180
- but I don't know how to tell if they're necessarily faster than an
FX-55 or a 64x2 4800+

 

Neither is a bad upgrade, but in my opinion that $200 - $400 would be
better applied to new hardware.

'pider