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I'm having problems getting useful information about this board. The customer has an AMD Sempron 2600+ @ 1.83GHz in it, and I'm sure that I checked the current speed of the memory and it was 333MHz, however all the information I've found so far about this board reckons it can't do 166MHz FSB!

It seems that Soltek have died since producing this board as well, which isn't helping things.

Cutting a long story short, the customer wants a faster processor for this machine, not a more significant/expensive upgrade. I bought an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (Barton core) with a 333MHz FSB, going for that in particular to ensure that it matched the speed of the memory. If anyone can find some more useful information than what I have so far, I would much appreciate knowing about it.

I'm considering just installing the new processor, making sure the voltages are correct and see what happens, but I would prefer to be as prepared as possible.

Google threw up this old thread. It quotes Soltek's FAQs (long dead unfortunately) as saying that 333MHz Bartons are unsupported, so doesn't look too hopeful.

It's not a faster processor. A person couldn't notice it at all. It's not going to be the difference between smooth HD playback or anything like that. You should tell your customer that there's no point in such a small "upgrade."

I have said to the customer that the ATI Radeon HD 4650 and AMD Athlon XP 2800+ is a gamble, but he seems set on it. I advised him to use his daughter's new laptop which has a Core i3 processor for the job in question, or replace his desktop, but he wanted to go with this.

It turned out that the board in the machine wasn't this Soltek one, but a Gigabyte board, which handled the Athlon XP 2800+ perfectly fine.

Back in the day when all I had was my Athlon XP 1800+, I used CoreAVC and it would play 720p H.264 videos very well except for complex scenes with a lot of motion or noise, like snowy or noisy scenes. I think a AGP Radeon HD with UVD would help tremendously in that department, though. I once had a Radeon HD 3850 AGP and it would play a 720p video on a Duron 900MHz with 0% CPU usage. Sadly the motherboard was on its last legs.

Skrying is dead-on right in his comment. I have family, friends and church-members constantly approaching me and wanting to have their hopelessly outdated units "upgraded", and most of the time it really doesn't make a substantial difference, and then I "inherit" all the complaints afterwards when they attempt to run proggies that just won't run on their antiques properly. Now my policy is, "I will build you a new one, but I don't do upgrades". I understand that at this point you are committed and must see it through, but for my money it's not worth the headaches.

The upgrades worked how they were supposed to (the customer wanted video decoding hardware acceleration - I did a GPU and CPU upgrade), I've just e-mailed him (a few months have gone by since) to ask him whether he feels that the computer is any faster generally speaking in his opinion.

I wouldn't normally try to sell an upgrade of that sort unless the customer insisted even after hearing my opinion, at that point it's their problem if they didn't take my advice. I sold a few Athlon 64 -> 64 X2 upgrades based on the idea of future proofing and that I would honestly do the same to my own system in the same circumstances, but I don't think my customers have been impressed with the results. It's the sort of thing that might not make much of a difference on the day it's done, but it might give the computer a year or two more in terms of 'adequate performance' as far as the average customer is concerned. Oh well, lesson learnt.