[General Motherboard] Dell Dimension 4550 Fastest cpu?

I want to upgrade the cpu on my Dell Dimension 4550 computer but I'm a little confused as to what kind of processor I can upgrade to. It currently has a 2.4ghz P4 cpu with the 533mhz bus(478 pin I believe). Am I stuck with using northwood processors with the 533mhz bus or can I replace it with cpus with the 800mhz bus? If I'm stuck with the 533 bus, what's the fastest processor out there I can use? The 2.8ghz cpu? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

Depending on your BIOS version, a 2.8/3.0 would be the top 478 processor your 845PE would support. Your stuck with an ancient chipset supporting 4 x AGP and 333 mhz. RAM. up to 512 MB I believe. Really, I wouldn't spend a dime on it.

http://support.dell.com/support/ed [...] tm#1103158

Your system specs according to the Dell link I provided for you says 2.8 and 3.06 compatible. Those are 800mhz fsb capable processors. Like I mentioned, you may have to update to the latest BIOS version to support the processors, obviously I don't know that for sure. I'm not sure if the 845 supports Prescott processors. It's getting difficult to locate a Northwood, the 478 is old news. I have a complete 3.0 ghz Northwood P4 800mhz fsb with an ABIT 478 MB and a GB of Kngston PC3200 sitting in my closet. It has a 9200 ATI radeon, 80Gb WD IDE enhanced HD, DVD burner, floppy drive, windows XP installed. The system runs perfect. I would sell it to you for $160 plus shipping. Good luck.

Possibly a reload of Windows may help too.
Depending on how good you are in cleaning Windows,
Reinstalls often give a speed boost.

The only thing with reloading Windows you also have to re-install all other application programs you've installed in the past or came with the system.

If you decide to upgrade your hard drive, you will need a cloning software to copy the entire contents of your current hard drive to the new one. Microsoft won't let you copy some files directly, so you will need this software. Basically, it creates a mirror/image copy of the current hard drive to a larger one. All you need to do is copy and swap the hard drives.

Aside from the 8 or 16MB cache mentioned earlier, get a Raptor Hard drive with 10,000 rpm for your Operating System and another hard drive (external/internal) for your personal files. This way, if your main hard drive fails it won't affect your personal files.

Make sure you also have a good cooling system if you plan to upgrade your processor. I suggest a CNPS9500 CNPS9700 (Zalman) for your Processor and a heatsink fan for the Northbridge chipset. If you wanna take it up a notch and have time and guts, overclock. That's if you wanna go overboard without having to shell out $ for a new processor or RAM upgrade.

I used to have a Gateway P4 1.4 GHz, 400FSB, socket 423, and 1G RAM. I spent some $ for a 2.8 GHz processor using a Socket 478 adapter and overclock it. I did pretty much everything I mentioned above but was it worth it? Well there was a significant change with the performance and it was also fun doing all that and see how it works, but that's a lot of work and a lot of reading. It was worth it.

Anyone know the maximum ram I can put on the motherboard? The specs say I can put 1gb total (2 x 512) with this motherboard but I'm wondering if I can put a couple of 1gb sticks in the machine instead?

In case anyone is still reading this thread, my personal hobby is "fixing" trash-can computers and getting them back into the community where many kids, and even institutions like rural libraries, are too poor to buy a nice, new, low-end Mac or Windows box... One of the PCs I recently overhauled was a $10 Dell 4550 from a thrift store.

The order of improvement was (1) more memory - a couple of surplus 512 Mb DDR sticks seemed adequate to me, (2) a surplus 120 Gb disk drive, and (3) the very latest version of Ubuntu (Debian Linux based, I believe), 9.10. The whole thing stayed well under $100... not counting another $35 for a used 15" LCD monitor and $5 for a new keyboard and a used optical mouse - all from thrifts.

At the risk of sounding like a Linux/Ubuntu nut, the move away from Microsoft XP Home - which came with my 4550 machine - made a very noticeable, positive difference and, fully "legal", cost nothing! Old PCs like these 4550s are roughly equivalent to modern netbooks in their raw hardware performance, but like those underpowered netbooks they tend to bog down on operating systems which insist on running too many, often unnecessary background processes all at once. Linux seems to work more efficiently, period.

There is another similarity between Atom-powered, 1.6 GHz netbooks and old P4, 2-3 GHz 4550s: Running many of the essential-with-Windows anti-virus programs will really bog down such marginal machines! If you do stick with Windows, do some online research and pick one of the more efficient but less well known (and less expensive) anti-virus programs. High price and heavy advertising does not make for the best performing product!

In Linux, of course, - as with the Mac - virus threats are very few and far between. Consequently, I run nothing on my cheap Ubuntu machines except a browser and Sun's OpenOffice freeware, so my "anti-virus protection" is no more than the easy-to-restore disk image I make when a refurbished PC is first configured! On my give-aways, I hand out that restore disk - and restore instructions - with the machine...

I just updated a Dimension 4550 from 256 meg ram to 1 gig.
After that, performance was decent for a user that just surfs the internet.
It is not the machine for blinding speed, but it was a huge improvement over the original 256 meg ram.
Great job with recycling the old machines, but I have to agree that Ubuntu can be fussy for the non computer savvy.
Keep those old machines going!

Hey badge, I would like to contact you about this computer, if you could e-mail me at TerryLeeCrawford@Gmail.com that would be great =)

As far as Ubuntu goes, I have 9.10 running on a 4550 now, 2.4GHz P4/1GB RAM/160GB HD and it runs great. Startup time is way faster than it was with XP, and it is smooth with the GeForce 4MX card that came with it. I am very happy with it.

Yes you can. I just did a quick upgrade on a few things on my old 4550 and it runs like a charm.

Upgrade list:
I found the 3.06ghz CPU for $35 at Star Micro [url=http://www.starmicro.net/detail.aspx?ID=121][/url]

Put in a 500gb WD WD5000JBRTL Blue Caviar at Best Buy for $65

Upgraded to 2gb of Ram from Newegg for $65 (two new sticks)

Loaded on a fresh install of W7 Home Premium upgrade ($109 at Walmart) and it it screams along pretty good.

Just need to put a decent Video Card in (shopping right now).

Running Office 2010, Adobe Master Collection CS4 (photoshop etc), and almost anything I can thow at it.

For a couple bucks, its a great home computer for my family and a few work projects from home, and seems alot faster than my neighbors new netbook!

I have a complete 3.0 ghz Northwood P4 800mhz fsb with an ABIT 478 MB and a GB of Kngston PC3200 sitting in my closet. It has a 9200 ATI radeon, 80Gb WD IDE enhanced HD, DVD burner, floppy drive, windows XP installed. The system runs perfect. I would sell it to you for $160 plus shipping. Good luck.

I gave this system to a friend of my daughter's for free when his Athlon 462 burned out. I have quite a few old systems I still use.

Most cards rated AGP 8x are backwards compatible and work fine in an AGP 4x slot.

Yes, most of them... but not ALL. Check it to make sure... it's a different voltage...

I damage the motherboard instaling 8x AGP card in 4x AGP slot and powerd up whole thing...

It was GForce 5600 on older PIII ECS motherboard 4x AGP.

So MAKE SURE!!!

I just slapped togather a Deminsion 4550 Dell I upgarded the Processor to 3.06 With hyper threading 2 Gigs of rams Radeon 9800 Pro graphics cards I just threw Windows 7 Ultimate On it and It runs great no slowdowns it can even run Dreamseances without any slowdown and has a higher windows index score then the Dell I rented from Rent a center to try out that they are selling for 3K. I bought it Used for 75 bucks off ebay and spend 65 on parts thats 145 bucks for a nice PC I even threw 2 dvd burners in it for double copying

Good for you, that sounds like you did a great job. Do you know if the system would support wireless networking?

^Report it the next time (If you don't do it this time )