Another thread about hardware compatible with SL

I'm planning to rebuild my faithful SL machine soon, as the ancient hard drive seems to be on its last leg and everything else could stand an upgrade. I'm not very good with hardware though, and I've heard of SL not getting along with certain things, so I wanted to ask the techies here about the things I need to upgrade.

1) Motherboard and CPU. The big one. My current mobo can't support a better graphics card than the one I currently have (no PCI-e slot), so I need to replace it with something that can before SL passes up my current system. I've heard though that SL doesn't like dual cores? Tigerdirect sells mobo and CPU combos which seem like a good deal (I can be sure the processor and mobo will work together...yes I'm that bad with hardware) Most are dual cores though and I don't have any experience with them.

2) Graphics card. The mobo I'm looking at lacks an AGP slot which means my current graphics card won't work, and I want to get a newer one anyway. Again, I've heard tales of woe with certain cards, so I'd like to know what to avoid.

3) Power supply. I don't know whether I need a new one or not...my current one is 450 watts.

Here's a tinyurl to my current wishlist on TigerDirect with the items I'm interested in, if you want to see: http://tinyurl.com/6y9sfz

Any advice?

EDIT: Forgot to mention, this is a PC that will be running Windows XP Home OEM.

Hi Maya, this may not be applicable since we run Macs...but all three machines use Intel dual cores. The laptop has a dual, one of the desktop's has 2 duals for a quad, and one has 4 duals for octo. All work great in SL. Hope this helps.

It does, I want to hear from people that use duals with SL. Thanks for the reply

I'm running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual.
My Graphics Cards is an nVidia GeForce 8500 GT 512MB
Currently running Second Life 1.20.17 (98669)
I've never had any problems with SL on this machine.

The Graphics Card I hear most people have trouble with are the ATI cards.

1) SL runs fine on dual cores,

2) make sure you have PCI-e AGP are very outdated now.

3) I recommend Nvida cards go with 8800GTX or 9800GT series (there are issues with the latest drivers but some have no issues, as well they

4) what OS will you be running? MAx out the RAMM if its XP run (2) 2 gig sticks it will make a big diffrence even though XP only uses 3. some odd #

5) 450 is pretty small if you start running the better cards, I would look at a 650 min or even a 750watt supply (of course this depends on all what you are going to put in it..)

Some one with more know how may have a better insight, I just know that even running my Nvidia mobo and dual core along with the 4 HDs 2 DVDs the 7900 card and recording sound cards, and all the powered by USB stuff... the 750 watt just makes it

I have never had a problem with dual cores on SL on Windows or Mac, and I've used three different AMD Athlon64 X2 motherboards with Windows *2000* (yes, released almost 10 years ago) with no problems that even at my geekiest I could imagine attributing to dual cores.
I would recommend a SATA (Serial ATA) rather than a PATA (Parallel ATA, AKA IDE) drive. That motherboard has 4 SATA connectors and only one IDE connector... and I suspect a SATA drive will be less expensive and higher performance than a PATA one at this point.

Good point. I've been using this ancient HDD from an eMachine for so long that just the change in spindle speed (4500 to 7200) would probably make such a noticeable difference that I didn't think of anything else. Only trouble is I'm not sure if I'll need new mounting hardware for a new hard drive. This drive is from an off the shelf PC, and those things often use their own specific stuff. At least my case is from a bare bones kit, and not, say, a Dell.

On the PCI-e front, what's the deal with PCI-e 2.0? Some info says that a mobo with PCI-e slots can use a PCI-e 2.0 card, so will a GeForce 9800 GT work in the motherboard I picked?