what to upgrade to and will i notice

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eighty8fierogt

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 23, 2004
Messages
131
So right now i have a 2.4ghz p4 northwood and im looking to go to a 3.2 or 3.4 pressy with HT. This a 478 chipset. I also have 1.5 gig of patriot 3200 ram. I also have no intrest in up grading mobo/ram/cpu/fx card at this time/ Just a nice bump of what I have.


Will this be a decent upgrade where id notice? Hopeing so as the prices really dropped concederably. About $115 for the 3.2 and $145 for the 3.4
 
When I went from a 533 FSB 2.4Ghz P4 to an 800 FSB 3.0 I remember noticing the speed difference. I don't remember how remarkable it was though. I had wanted the 3.4 but couldn't justify the extra cost.

Go for the 3.4!!! :)

I upgraded because I borked my 865 board somehow and ended up with an Abit IC7 Maxx 3 (oh yeah, my roommate threw the dead 865 motherboard away and she bought me the Maxx 3 to make up for it). I also added a gig of PC3500 for some light OC'ing.

Matter of factly, if I had not borked the Maxx3, I would most likely have went for a 3.4ghz Prescott/Presscot (can't seem to remember the spelling) a year ago. Afterwards I would have follwed up with a new jet impingement water block and 2 gigs of memory, but instead I went AMD64 because I borked the Maxx3 putting a new HSF on it after I had removed my water block - the screwdriver slipped and I can't solder :( .
 
Either go for the core 2 duo or forget upgrading , wait for the E4200
 
I dont want to upgrade to a new chipset. That means new graphics card, new ram, new mobo, and new cpu. Not happning. I have about 150 max to spend. Jsut seeing if this is really going to be a noticeable differance.

i have a 6800 nu runnin a 400/900 so no real need for a new card. Shes aging but not outdated yet. :)
 
2.4 to 3.2 will be a good improvement. Wont be top of the line but it will be better.

Dont let these guys try to tell ya that unless you have the latest and greatest you just arent cool. 2 year old tech works just as good as the new stuff it just takes a little longer to do things.
 
You could try to OC your p-4 northwood. I have heard that those OC very nicely. You should be able to hit 3.0 with little difficulty.
 
from previous experience you should notice a smoother feel to your desktop experience. But you will also notice higher termperatures with the presscotts. so yes its kinda worth it if you see it in that sense.

If you can though ( you really should! ) , take the advice from the other poeple, and you shoudl save up for a new system all together. its time to upgrade to the new intel chips!!!!
 
I have to agree with DeChache. Some of us here are not kids and have other responsibility's that our hard earned dollars need to go towards.

Unless the guy needs more frames per second on the latest games or is doing a lot of video rendering what the hell does he need to dump all his perfectly fine hardware for? To get the latest and the greatest? What for?
Is it going to make a difference on how fast he can burn a music cd, a dvd? or browsing the net or even playing around a little in Photoshop? Hell no.

A nice upgrade to a 3.2ghz or 3.4ghz will do everything almost as fast as the latest and the greadest, except for benchmark scores, games and video rendering. And if it has hyper threading it will multi task satisfactory.

I say if you don't have the cash for a completely new upgrade don't fret it. Pick up a 3.2ghz or a 3.4ghz northy or prescott and it should hold you over for a while yet.

The rig in my sig does everything I need it to do just fine and even plays games to my satisfaction, but I am not big into games. I am thinking about a upgrade in 6 months to a year, but to tell you the truth if I see a 3.4ghz 478 cpu pop up somewhere for around a $100 I might pick one up myself to hold me over for awhile yet.

You guys that have the newest stuff is all fine and dandy. I think its a great hobby if you can afford it. But the hardware he already has is fairly decent and he has already stated that he has a set amount to spend for a upgrade and thats it.
 
The 478 prescott's are furnances. You can get a 3.4 northwood for around $150. If you like AMD, you can also find AMD processor + motherboard deals for under $150 that would provide excellent performance as well.

Here's a 3.4 northwood for $120:

http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=P3.4_800
 
Asrock 775Dual-VSTA + E6300 or for super cheap a Pentium D 805~820.

$55 motherboard that gives you DDR and DDR2 support, allows you the use of both AGP or PCIe, supports every 775LGA CPU.

I know you might not want to change the motherboard in fear of having to reinstall Windows, but this upgrade will allow you to move up to the Core 2 Duo's when the time comes and upgrade to a PCIe card when the time comes, or to DDR2, etc etc.

The only possibly issue I see is that you said you have 1.5GB of RAM, I'm assuming that means you have 3x512MB sticks, sadly the Asrock motherboard only has two slots (up to 2GB supported, so 2x1GB sticks) for each type of memory (2xDDR and 2XDDR2).

Just throwing it out there.
 
I have a very similar system to CPUMan (2.4C Northwood, but a 9500pro in place of a 9600, and close to 500gigs HD space to his 80), and I have to agree that it does everything I need at the moment. I am sure my next build will be Conroe or Kentsfield, but as for now, I am waiting it out, seeing how prices change and etc.

I am obviously not a big PC gamer given my specs, but everything else runs smoothly enough (though my system does come down near a standstill during a virus scan). Personally, I am not one for incremental upgrades, I build a computer, use it until it is out of date and can't keep up (my last computer was an AMD K6-2 450mhz) then jump a couple generations to whatever is new and at the best price point.
 
Skrying said:
Asrock 775Dual-VSTA + E6300 or for super cheap a Pentium D 805~820.

$55 motherboard that gives you DDR and DDR2 support, allows you the use of both AGP or PCIe, supports every 775LGA CPU.

I know you might not want to change the motherboard in fear of having to reinstall Windows, but this upgrade will allow you to move up to the Core 2 Duo's when the time comes and upgrade to a PCIe card when the time comes, or to DDR2, etc etc.

The only possibly issue I see is that you said you have 1.5GB of RAM, I'm assuming that means you have 3x512MB sticks, sadly the Asrock motherboard only has two slots (up to 2GB supported, so 2x1GB sticks) for each type of memory (2xDDR and 2XDDR2).

Just throwing it out there.
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I was looking at that myself a few weeks ago. And your point about the memory is exactly what stopped me. I have 1gig 4X256. It is not a bad way to go if your on a limited budget and already have a couple of sticks off 512 ddr 400 and a agp video card laying around .

To Skrying, That is a good price for that 3.4 northwood CPU.
 
NulloModo said:
I have a very similar system to CPUMan (2.4C Northwood, but a 9500pro in place of a 9600, and close to 500gigs HD space to his 80), and I have to agree that it does everything I need at the moment. I am sure my next build will be Conroe or Kentsfield, but as for now, I am waiting it out, seeing how prices change and etc.

I am obviously not a big PC gamer given my specs, but everything else runs smoothly enough (though my system does come down near a standstill during a virus scan). Personally, I am not one for incremental upgrades, I build a computer, use it until it is out of date and can't keep up (my last computer was an AMD K6-2 450mhz) then jump a couple generations to whatever is new and at the best price point.
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I hear ya. I went from a AMD K6-2 500mhz machine to the pc in my sig in early 2004. I was like Damn this thing is fast, LOL. The only upgrades I have done since is add a couple of dvd burners and another WD 80 gig hard drive To bring me up to 160gig of HD space. I just never updated my sig. It's not the fastest pc around. But I would not call it slow either and its stable as a rock and does every thing I need it to do.
 
CpuMan said:
I hear ya. I went from a AMD K6-2 500mhz machine to the pc in my sig in early 2004. I was like Damn this thing is fast, LOL. The only upgrades I have done since is add a couple of dvd burners and another WD 80 gig hard drive To bring me up to 160gig of HD space. I just never updated my sig. It's not the fastest pc around. But I would not call it slow either and its stable as a rock and does every thing I need it to do.
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That's all I require of mine as well, but encoding video is incredibly slow on this machine. I at least want to go Dual-Core, though the new Quad-Core Mac Pros really have me drooling.
 
NulloModo said:
That's all I require of mine as well, but encoding video is incredibly slow on this machine. I at least want to go Dual-Core, though the new Quad-Core Mac Pros really have me drooling.
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I agree if you do a lot of video encoding, it would be a good reason to upgrade if you have the $$$. A while back I tried converting some .avi videos I had to vcd's and it was kind of slow. But I do not do it often enough to justify a upgrade. I just let it run overnight.
I don't see the problem you do, using my pc while doing virus scans? Hard drive access gets a little slow. But running programs work fine for me while virus scanning. I use AVG free.
 
CpuMan said:
I agree if you do a lot of video encoding, it would be a good reason to upgrade if you have the $$$. A while back I tried converting some .avi videos I had to vcd's and it was kind of slow. But I do not do it often enough to justify a upgrade. I just let it run overnight.
I don't see the problem you do, using my pc while doing virus scans? Hard drive access gets a little slow. But running programs work fine for me while virus scanning. I use AVG free.
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Hmm, I use AVG Free too, I probably do need to get around to degragging my disks again. I hardly convert to VCD anymore just because it takes so long, if it was faster, I would do it more, plus burn a lot more DVDs.
 
NulloModo said:
Hmm, I use AVG Free too, I probably do need to get around to degragging my disks again. I hardly convert to VCD anymore just because it takes so long, if it was faster, I would do it more, plus burn a lot more DVDs.
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Do you mean burning DVD's are slow for you? It only takes me about 7 minutes to burn a full 4.5gig single layer DVD. I also use DVD shrink a lot. For me to burn a back up copy of a dvd movie using dvd shrink, copying to the HD and then burning it usually takes about 20 min, depending on how much I had to shrink the movie.
 
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