Pentium 4 (478) upgrade?

[dcp11oc]

I have a asusp4p800--deluxe motherboard and was wondering whether its worth upgrading the cpu
Intel Pentium 4 2.80E to Pentium 4 3.40E which is the highest (except Pentium "Extreme") the motherboard can support?

The reason why I want to do this is because I want to replace my semi broken GeForce FX5500 256MB with a new hopefully better one so the cpu could catch up with it.

Thanks.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Yes it can support it. I have that exact mobo (well the P4P800 Deluxe) in my old machine and have the Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition running happy and cool for about 4 years now.

Here is a link:

http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/cpusupport.aspx?model=P4P800&SLanguage=en-us

Shows support for pretty much every P4 on the 478 socket, even the Prescott cores. Just make sure you have the 1017 BIOS or higher.

But TBH, thats a very old machine. But the best GPU you can get is a HD3850 AGP. Problem is that ATI doesn't support it anymore.

 

[dcp11oc]

Thanks for that I'll have a look.

I'm quite surprised that card costs £85 on amazon!
By not supporting it does that mean that they won't bring out new drivers?
Suppose this means that AGP is "dead"?

Do you think it's worth investing this amount on this PC? I suppose it's cheaper then spending it on a new one.

Again, thanks for the help.

 

[hefox]

My suggestion is to buy a new pc. Even with one of the lowest configuration, it will be better comparing to what you have right now. Instead of spending money on something that it's "dead", you can spend £200-£300 and buy a decent pc. Let us know what you need the pc for and how much you want to spend for the new one and I am sure we will be able to help you.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Thanks for that I'll have a look.

I'm quite surprised that card costs £85 on amazon!
By not supporting it does that mean that they won't bring out new drivers?
Suppose this means that AGP is "dead"?

Do you think it's worth investing this amount on this PC? I suppose it's cheaper then spending it on a new one.

Again, thanks for the help.

AGP is dead. And yes they wont have new drivers for it. Only custom drivers like Omega drivers do now. I think 8.6 was the last AGP supporting driver set.

Its not but depending on your budget maybe we can get you something decent? I mean a dual core,2-4GB of DDR2, a mobo and GPU would be quite cheap really. prolly around $300 (or whatever pounds that is.....)

 

[dcp11oc]

Okay thanks guys.

Interesting offer seems that upgrading it will cost half as much as buying a new one!

Well basically I use it for general office work, word processing, spreadsheets, Internet etc. and some light games. Well the most graphic game I play is called Counter Strike Source.

That's how I think I know that my card is dying because sometimes after some time (20mins sometimes less) distored graphics and sometimes it shows red on screen and black spots flickering - and this is on the lowest of the low settings.

And it carried on after I reinstalled/updated drivers on OS (and reinstalled OS).

 

[hefox]

Let us know how much you want to spend and if you have any parts that you might want to use on the new pc (case, HDD, dvd-rom, etc).

 

[dcp11oc]

Not sure to be honest but anything cheap but that is better than the current system and a better graphics card will do

 

[hefox]

Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5300
Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3L
Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB PCI-Express
OCZ Platinum Revision 2 XTC 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4
Hiper 530W HPU-4M530 SLi Certified
Asus TM-261 Case
Samsung SpinPoint F1 320GB
Samsung SH-S223F/BEBE 22x
All of this should be around £400.
You can use the old HDD and dvd-rom if you want to save around £50.