thinkin of upgrading my cpu

[nickmagnus]

Hi all im new to the forum and just had a question cuz thinkin of upgrading. According to what it says on the dell site about my current cpu is this:
PROCESSOR, 80547, PENTIUM 4 PRESCOTT DT, 660, SKT-T, P 3.6ghz


all i do on my computer is game more or less. Will i see any significant performance boost going to a dual core of either brand or shall i stick it out for awhile longer? thank you

 

[Guest]

For gaming you should concentrate on the video card. Not many games will benefit from Dual Core...

 

[nickmagnus]

oh i should have said that i did just upgrade my card to a 7950 gx2, i love that thing!

 

[dasickninja]

What about future proofing? then again, will his board support a Conroe, or a PD?
@nickmagnus
Sweet, a fellow GX2 user.

 

[jaguarskx]

I would stick with what you have right now. Most games don't benefit much from dual core processors yet. Games based on the Quake 4 engine should see a good boost though when the game is patched.

However, there are games on the horizon that may require a dual core CPU in the future. One such game is called Alan Wake which is supposed to have 5 threads running at the same time. Surely that would choke a single core CPU.

Wait until there is a game which you want to play that absolutely requires a dual core CPU.

 

[sailer]

I think you would get a boost in some things, but not much for games at the moment. I would say to hold off for a bit, save your money, and then look at some of the new hardware that's coming out. Then you might either get something at a lower price, or you might decide to replace not only the cpu, but the motherboard, etc.

Eventually games will be using multicore cpu's, but again, that means you'll get a better advantage by waiting so you have more choices to pick from.

 

[nickmagnus]

yeah its always good to wait, i just got the money to burn so im anxious to upgrade.

 

[sailer]

yeah its always good to wait, i just got the money to burn so im anxious to upgrade.

I'm in that mode of being anxious to upgrade myself, but I keep reminding myself that in another three months or so, there should be a new operating system, newer, faster cpu's, graphics cards, etc. So I pratice that age old advice of patience, and more patience. Its worth it in the end, especially when the new stuff is so close.

 

[SidVicious]

You might as well give up, upgrading pre-builts, especially those from Dell, is an exercise in futility­.

First off, 3.6GHz is just 200MHz shy of the highest clocked stock P4, definetly not worth it to spend money on such an insignificant upgrade.

On top of that, I doubt that your motherboard chipset allows an upgrade path that leads to dual core Netbursts or C2Ds.

Even if you decide to get a brand spankin' new video card, chances are that the extra load would exceed what the PSU is capable of providing.

 

[fishboi]

I still think the E6400 is great chip, and you can OC to speeds in the 3.2Ghz+ range. Something to think about.

 

[SidVicious]

Think all you want, this won't magically make his mobo C2D compatible if the chipset and BIOS don't support it.

Same goes for overclocking, since Dell BIOS don't allow changing the FSB, unless a 3rd party app is compatible with the PPL IC on the motherboard, he'll be stuck with a stock CPU (no pun intended).

 

[dasickninja]

Tried it on a Dell Dimension. Not a good idea for any one to do. I only moved up the slider incrementally on Clockgen and it totally froze the processor. I tried this for every PLL combination and the same thing occurred. I think since Dell makes their own proprietary motherboards the PLL for it is unsupported. I'll try it on the XPS 700 tomorrow.