Hi I have a Dell E510 with a Pentium D 940 @ 3.2ghz and a 8800GT. I was playing games well (shooters like cod4 and crysis) but when I loaded up CnC3, there was a huge bottleneck. (performed way worse than a 7950GT) I could tell there was a bottle neck bec, during 3Dload, the temp didn't go up at all. (It stayed the same as the idle temp). Well it looks like I have to keep this rig for a while so I wanted to upgrade the processor. The mainboard is a I945G I think. But the problem is, the E510 don't have support for Core 2 Duo's. So I was hoping a Pentium dual core (E2200 2.2ghz allendale) or Celeron dual core E1400 2.0ghz would work with my E510 since they are not Core 2 Duo. Will any of them work? Also which would perform better and not cause to be a bottleneck to my 8800GT.
No. Both the Pentium dual core and Celeron dual core are still based on Core 2 architecture (they're not called "core 2 duo", but in all actuality they are indeed Core 2 Duo CPUs). Sorry.
How much do you have to spend and what do you already have? If you've already got everything else, you could probably get a whole new case, PSU, mobo and cpu for under 200 bucks. Maybe 150 if you really watch it. I think that about 160ish could get you a case with power supply, cheap board and sempron dual core. The case comes with a psu, not high name brand or anything but the ratings look good and it's only 50 bucks for both. The psu if i'm not mistaken is a 585 watt with dual 12v+ rails one rated for 20 amps, the other at 19. Never used one before, but if you have a low budget I might give it a shot. Because amd sempron dual cores are only 50 and a motherboard, could probably be had cheap, depending on how much you want to spend. I might look into that if it were me.
if your motherboard doesn't support the core 2 cpus it will not support the pentium dual-core processor. peitium dual core and core 2 duo cpus are based on the same architecture.
