Upgrading ASUS P3V4X

There are a couple of ways to look at this. If you upgrade to a P4 system that accepts sdram, mainly Intel 845 chipset boards. You will have to get a new power supply or adapter to plug into the new 12 volt plug on the P4 board. The Athlon based motherboards that accept sdram don't require this plug but you need a robust power supply anyway , but some of these boards have ram slots for both SDRAM and DDR. One that comes to mind was the ECS K7S5A pro but its limitation was DDR266. There aren't alot of new boards that I know of that have the sdram capability

The best to do this in an economical way is buy a new motherboard which would take SDRAM.  The new board could either be P3 (of course it should be a faster processor than yours) or P4 (older P4 boards do use SDRAM).  Keeping in mind that you need to look at whether other components are practical to move to the new PC.  For example, it your hard drive is 10GB or smaller, there is no point buying the faster process running with a slow drive.... e.g. you go ahead and buy a brand new 2005 Corvette but you then use cheap gasoline (regular gasoline), cheapest spark plugs you could find, cheapest tires on the market ...etc.... the list goes on... Your vet obviously won't perform as well as you would like it to...  In your case if your hard drive happens to be less than 20GB, buying a faster processor and better motherboard won't improve the performance of your system that much.  I would assume you are looking at a better performance of your PC...In my opinion, CPU, HDD, RAM and the motherboard itself are the most important components in your system and the performance of your PC is greatly depending on them.

I hope this helps you to determine what is best for you  Good luck... Ask if you have any other questions...

Your best bet would be to buy a used PC that will allow you to beef it up with your existing components.  By far the least expensive route.  Also a lot less work than replacing most of the parts in your old system.

For example this old IBM would bump you up to a P4 1.6 and take your SDRAM and the hard drive,

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1447090&CatId=118

For a cost of about $170.00 and big improvement in performance.

This is just an example,  you might find something better in a local used PC store or elsewhere on the net,  mabye ebay.

These days with full systems can be had for under $400 - with OS - it makes it hard to justify all but fairly minor system upgrades when you are going from one generation to the next in hardware.  I am not saying these are 'great' systems but they will far outperform your old P3.

You can go up to a PIII 1G cpu. A used 800 or 850 will work fine (try to find an 850 w/512L2 cache; yes, they were made as I have a couple still in use and they will bench (when multitasking) better than most newer Celerysticks under 2.2G)and 512mb of ram makes a big difference also. It isn't a cheap upgrade and you might consider going with a newer mobo/cpu/memory. Make sure to FLASH the BIOS with the proper download from Asus and update all drivers.

Ignore the part about 512mb of memory as you already have a gig.......sorry

Treeking,

Will a PIII 1G cpu go right into the motherboard.  Do you know if I would need to do any other modifications?

Thanks,
Paul

One more option for your board is a slotket adapter found here http://www.upgradeware.com/english/product/slott/slott.htm it allows for faster processors to be installed in your board than it was originally built for. It would be a socket 370 processr fitted in the slotket adaptor. it is a Featured processor upgrade for Asus p3v4x boards.

Anybody know how I can tell what version of the P3V4X I have?  100mhz or 133 mhz?

Check on the board,Its either silkscreened on there or its on the side of the last slot on the board.You may have to use a mirror if its there or take it out to see which version it is.

The rev is 1.02

I found out I have a 133 bus speed.  I have BIOS version 1006 beta 001.  I saw a Intel Pentium III P3 Processor SL3XY 733MHz Socket 370 on eBay and was wondering if it would work.

Thanks for accepting my answer. I think you should probably start a new thread since you still have questions though. One clarification point for you:

If you have a P3V4X rev 1.02 mobo it is NOT a Socket 370 but a Slot 1 as I maintained all along. As a backup source read this:

" The Asustek P3V4X Rev. 1.02 stood out in the Slot 1 category of our recent motherboard roundup.    It is an ATX motherboard which uses an Award Modular v.600PG/1005 BIOS and a VIA Apollo Pro 133A chipset, with the VT82C694X as its north bridge controller and the VT82C596B as its south bridge controller. It houses four DIMM slots, one ISA slot, six PCI slots, and a 4X AGP type slot.

This board posted a score of 140    in the BAPCO SYSmark 2000 test and delivered good marks in the frame rate tests at 56.7 fps in Demo 1 and 56.2 in Demo 2. We were able to overclock it up to 575    MHz and got an 8.91% increase in the normal setting using the PIII 500 CPU -- the highest performance increase in its category. Its power management and hardware monitoring features are also decent. Tagged at P5,320, the P3V4X grabbed our Best Buy award for its category with its reasonable price, great features and performance"

From:

http://www.itnetcentral.com/article.asp?id=96¤tpage=153&info=home&leveli=0 

And a little more for you:

ASUS P3V4X REV 1.02 HIGH PERFORMANCE PENTIUM 3/CELERON MOTHERBOARD.

CPU InterfaceSlot-1
ChipsetVIA Apollo Pro 133A VIA 694X North Bridge VIA 596B South Bridge L2 CacheN/A (on-chip)
Form FactorATX
Bus Speeds66 / 68 / 75 / 80 / 85 / 90 / 95 / 100 / 103 / 105 / 110 112 / 115 / 116 / 118 / 120 / 124 / 126 / 130 / 133 / 135 138 / 140 / 142 / 144 / 146 / 148 / 150 / 155 / 160 / 166
Voltages Supported1.65V - 2.10V (in 0.05V increments) 2.10V - 2.40V (in 0.1V increments)
Memory Slots4 168-pin DIMM Slots
Expansion Slots0 AMR Slot 1 AGP Slot 6 PCI Slots (6 Full Length) 1 ISA Slot (1 Shared / 1 Full Length)
Onboard SoundNone
BIOSAward Medallion v6.00

You'll need to find a Slot1, 100mhz cpu. Tough but maybe you can find an 850mhz (512 L2 cache-rare) or maybe a 1G. Good luck as in a quick check I didn't find any. At one time we had several 1Gs laying around the shop but I have no idea what happened to them.

I actually bought a 733 mhz P3 Slot1 CPU for $14.00 including shipping.