Pentium 3s

Can I buy a new motherboard and CPU and use my old hardware?

Just want to see what I would need to do to get a faster chip and use my old drives.

Public Comments

1. While you could probably do it, your old hardware will become the bottleneck to your system. Newer drives are faster now too.
2. Yes
3. depends on what new mobo you get. probably you have also to get new ram and a new graphics card. new mobos mostly have DDR2 ram sockets and PCI express slots for the graphics card, they are not compatible with DDR ram and AGP graphic cards don't fit in PCIe slots. all other hardware can be used further on if you get a mobo that can handle both IDE and SATA drives.
4. You can do that but you need to have compatible parts. Your hard drives will all work with it, and your video card probably would also. But you got to make sure the Ram you are using is compatible with your board, and the power supply powerful enough to support the upgrade and whether the motherboard will fit into your old case... Those are the main things you would have to check. But as far as drives are concerned, those will work fine. The website you buy the motherboard from should have some sort of specifications for what it will take. Make sure and check all that and have all compatible parts. To tell you the truth, you can probably get a better deal on Dell and just add additional drives to that machine, just make sure you get one with a big case.
5. This totally depends on how old your hardwares are. The only things are for sure will work are CD-ROM, floppy and hard drive (unless you buy a new motherboard that only support SATA hard drive). For most of the time, memory is not going to be good for reuse. I strongly suggest you go to a local small computer shop to ask, for most of time they will NOT charge you for checking compitibility. If you don't go get checked and trial-and-error, you will mostly likely to damage your computer parts.