Well, the hunting game is over, and I'm sad about the outcome. I took
it apart and removed the heatsink. The socket is a 478. I've seen
quite a few pictures of the 478 and 775 now, posted on the web. Mine
looks just like the 478, the square tan/white color with a thick
plastic side lever that lifts straight up. I removed the CPU and all
the pins are attached to the CPU. I read the 775 has the pins on the
motherboard and holes on the CPU, unlike the 478.
So, I guess if I'm going to buy components to do my upgrade, I'm only
going to be able to keep my DVD writer and external peripherals. New
mobo, cpu, memory and hard drive (remember I don't have SATA).
I've been to Fry's now. They have a motherboard that has SATAII (3Gb/s
instead of 150Mb/s) and PCI-E X16. I think the tech said PCI-E X16 was
better then just PCI-E. The motherboard was only $59 after $30 mail-in
rebate. But the kicker was buying the AMD processor for it. A 3200+
was $300. And they went way up in speed and price from there. If I
spend another $200 on a good PCI-E video card, that doesn't leave me
enough for hard drive and memory.
I think I'm stuck with this thing until prices come down in another
year or so, maybe early 2007 I'll price things out again.
Thanks for all the responses provided!
-Terry
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