A couple months ago I stuck some new memory in my puter knocking it up to over a gig of RAM. I used some tiny program from a company that analyzed my computer and then showed me what memory I could buy and it would work with my computer.
I think it’s about time to upgrade my video card and processor. I contacted the manufacturer, Gateway, about the processor and they found 1 processor that I could upgrade to. I’ve got a Pentium 4, 1.5ghz, and I’d be upgrading to a Pentium, 2.0ghz. (I’m not sure if that’s going to be enough or not). They gave me the link to buy it from Gateway directly but it was out of stock.
So, what I’m looking for is a program that could give me a list of processors compatible with my computer/motherboard. (and if does video cards too, that’d be an extra bonus).
Video cards should be easy. If you’ve got a motherboard modern enough to support a P4, it’ll take any AGP video card, and almost all video cards come mainly in AGP (except some of the bleeding edge ones that are PCI-X).
I’m not aware of a program that will tell you what processors are compatible with your board. If you have the model number of your motherboard, you can check its manual online and there should be a list.
Just post what Mobo it is here, and I can most likely find out what chips are compatible. If you don’t know or can’t find out, what model dell are you using?
SiSoft Sandra is an awesome program that will tell you the specs on everything you have, but I don’t think it tells you specifically what you can upgrade to. However, you can use the info gotten from Sandra to then figure it out. (In other words, Sandra will tell you you have a socket 370 compatible mobo and then you can work from there.) Sandra Download
Also, just as an aside (and walrus may already know this) PCI-X is not the same as PCI Express. If you didn’t have AGP, and you were more advanced, you’d most likely have PCI Express.
BTW stpauler, the processor link you gave earlier from gateway is a Celeron, not a Pentium. Which one do you have, cause you’ve been saying Pentium. According to Intel, your board supports both, but 2.2GHz is the highest they list for a Celeron.
Everything I’m showing on my computer is saying Intel. The sticker, when i click on my computer and properties, and the everest prog. I wonder why Gateway lead me to that one when I did their online support?
Both those processors are made by Intel, and your board supports both. If you run the Everest program, and look at Motherboard -> CPU, it’ll say which one you have.
The extent of my knowledge re those two chips, is if you’re into gaming, you want a Pentium.
If you have a Celeron, I don’t know what, if anything, you’d have to do to replace it with a Pentium, and vice-versa. Hopefully some hardware savvy guru will be along to say.
The Celeron is a budget processor made by Intel - basically, it is the crippled version of the Pentium 4, with half the L2 cache & a slower FSB. This allows Intel to sell otherwise functional processor, that just had part of the L2 cache go bad during the manufacture.
Note, my parents have a 2.4ghz Celeron & a 1.6 Pentium 4 machine, otherwise similarly equiped, and the 1.6ghz Pentium 4 box is faster than the Celeron. Pentium 4 chips needs lots of L2 cache to run well, though the Celery is fine for office work.
The fastest you will be able to uprgrade your machine to is a 2ghz Pentium 4, for $111 at Pricewatch. Alternatively, you could pick up a much faster AthlonXP motherboard & chip for just a little more - $60 will get a good Nforce2 motherboard, & an AthlonXP 2400 will run $70 or so. This upgrade would be more involving though.
Finally, before you upgrade your video card, pop open the side of the case, and see how many watts your power supply supplies - the sticker should read “300 Watts” or something similar. Many modern video cards can be power hogs, and since you have an large OEM computer, it probably has a crappy power supply.
You can upgrade all the way up to the AthlonXP 3200, but the speed boost isn’t worth the price, heck, you could probably overclock your 2600 up to 3200 speeds without much trouble, - you would be better saving up for an Athlon 64 system.
Not true. Around the time that first gen p4s were the popular, the standard agp speed motherboards supported was 4x, I believe. Most new cards are 8x only - it requires a different voltage, so if your board doesn’t support 8x agp, you can’t run it.
This is incorrect - most new cards are backwards compatible to 4x AGP. A quick check at newegg shows that even most of the high end cards like the Geforce 6800 GT & Radeon x800 Pro support running on a 4x bus. Of course, a high end card like these probably wouldn’t work on a an older OEM PC like his - I would swag that he has a 250 watt power supply. My parent’s HP 1.6ghz P4 machine has only a 250watt supply, and it sometimes has problems with the little GeforceFX 5200 card they put in it.
The voltage difference occured between 2X and 4X (IIRC from 5V to 3.3V). The 4X AGP videocard will not fix a 5V 2X AGP slot.
Anything with 4X will run 4 and 8X. According to benchmarks from Toms Hardware there’s yet no significant difference between the two (nothing yet on the market truely uses 8X speeds).
