saaiello said:
Even with a 3.2ghz Hyper Threaded P4 e will not see any noticeable differences in speed in most apps netburst tech is just to old and too inefficient to matter yea a $30 P4 HT could help a little but save that 30 for a few months and the OP could at least get an AMD Athlon II mobo and processor that will run circles around his P4.
Fair enough, that it's not going to be anywhere near the best bang for the buck, if you have those bucks and a lot more (couple hundred) - if you have this system with the mobo, ram, hd's, dvd drives, graphics card, in hand then a processor can be a viable option - the difference between 400, 533 and 800 with a step up to say a 3.4Ghz HT or better processor can be a nice improvement for an average user if they felt the system was straining to perform with the 533 FSB and slower Core. (what usually prompts this is HD VIDEO playback) - there are some encodings that i've witness stutter as they max CPU out) - a big enough bump up and going to 800mhz can provide the necessary leg room for it be played, that or buy a suitable graphics card that can offload the video processing onto it's GPU.
I build cheap systems that are quite decent (and also very expensive custom systems), but I also don't discount P4 and Athlon (single core systems though).
I sell used systems like these everyday. They are cheap and again for 85% of the public that does basic computer tasks they are great!! I deal with a lot of low income families and even what i think of as a "cheap system $250 - $300 is a back breaker... for them it's just not an option. However, a lucky snag on Flea-bay or geeks can be a nice go round for them.
I even use them as home servers and P2P boxes.
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BUT... my main purpose for posting this was just the inherrant error in what that person had said.
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Additional info if anyone has one of these.
As i dug into the BIOS release notes for this and comparable systems using the same BIOS. I found the following:
" version 2AKT46A
Adds new
microcode for 0F34 (patch ID was 0Eh, now 13h)
and 0F41 (patch ID was 05h, now 09h)
Adds a fan control update that will skip the voltage regulator temperature test on the small-form-factor chassis
version 2AKT45A
Rerelease of BIOS 44A
version 2AKT44A
-
Fixes the support for the 0F41 (Prescott E0-step) processor
-
Fixes a problem where the system hangs with 0F41 (Prescott
E0-step) processor
[b
]- Increases SMBIOS Type 4 structure maximum CPU speed entry from
3200MHz to 3400MHz[/b]
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==== So it's reasonable to believe that it supports a 3.4ghz processor (not sure if that's Northwood, Prescott or both)...
Also the underlined part about the CPU ID noted above of "0F41" belongs to Prescott's all the way up to 3.4Ghz 1MB L2 cache 800Mhz FSB, Oops 3.4Ghz was the highest Prescott 478 i could find...
no again no guarantee that it is for the Ibm A50 - 8194 and not another model using the same BIOS but ?? worth looking into. The standard Heatsink & fan that the OP system came with would likely have to be upgraded as well if you went the Prescott route.