The best cpu

is there a way that i can find out online the best cpu that my mother board can handle easily?

i do allot of multitasking, it isn't uncommon for me to have over 300 tabs open in firefox for days, and while i have that open i also have other cpu intensive things running in the background.

i realize that my mother board is old and the components are becoming dated, but if i can extend the life of my computer by a few years by upgrading the cpu id rather spend the 200-250 for a new power supply and cpu than spend the 7-800 on a completely new computer.

thats more or less what i thought however i have a problem.

the socket type is 775 LGA
and it currently has a
pentium 4 530

the best i can put in it (while not totaly blowing the price vs preformance off) is a Intel Core 2 Quad Processor Q9400

this next bit is something someone else told me without helping me a whole lot, this was on a different forum

"i would think that the motherboard would be the main concern here... there is 3 generations of processors between your current processor and the one you're suggesting to buy...
from pentium 4- dual core- core 2 55 nanometer - core 2 45 nanometer

the possibility of your motherboard being capable to use such a processor would be very small... it might require from a BIOS flashing to a replacement because of incompatibility...

also if you're adding a new processor, you might also need a new power supply..."

before i spend 200+ on getting the processor, i want to know if it will work beyond a reasonable doubt. is there any way to know 100% that it will work with my motherboard?

yea. i found where to look it up.

the best i could do is
pentium 4 660

i curently have
pentium 4 530

would i notice a significant performance increase? i mean for a quad core i was willing to flash the bios, but that is risking my whole computer, im less willing to flash it for less performance increases.

lets say my current processor was 1000. what would this one be like? number wise?

and also having that may tabs open takes less ram than you think, however processor is usually being used at over 30% than.

would it be worth the upgrade? i never replaced a cpu and the whole thing would be new to me. if it was a quad core, performance increase out weighs everything else, but doesn't look like a huge leap performance wise to me. would it still be worth the upgrade?

If your system originally came with a p4, there's no way it would support a quad core core2 duo. It's not that hard to change a motherboard, if your case has a removable backplate (i/o shield). I would look into getting a g31 board which fits most cases with the removable backplate, unless your board is btx. Newegg has some combo specials with micro atx boards that might work for you, if you use ddr2.

DDR3 does not improve the performance noticeably in most cases. What you want for RAM is quantity, not speed.

I have couple of refurbished gaming laptops and with 4 GB of RAM installed in each of them but I am more concerned about the laptop video cards installed in them. Could you suggest what configuration would be considered decent for playing heavy graphics games on a laptop?

By heavy graphics I just mean games which require high configuration so that the games could be played without error and when I talk about high configuration, I am specifically pointing to CPU and RAM which is generally recommended for top end gaming machines certainly including refurbished gaming laptops as well. Although certain other laptop parts are also responsible but just not getting into too much details here.