Like Master Pro said - the Phenom II would be a better option. I have a Q9550 and love it as well, but the older Phenoms are a little lacking (compared to the new ones).
Its not really a "bad" processor. The Phenom II's are just faster. Get one of those if you can afford it. If price is the issue, get the 9950 and make sure the motherboard you pair it with will support updates to Phenom II in the future.
I don't think that the 9950 BE is economically viable right now.It was last years top of the line AMD CPU.
How about this instead.You can basically get the motherboard for free (if you send in the $15 rebate) and the current top of the line AMD Quad at 3.2 Ghz.Note the motherboard only has one PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot but that's perfectly O.K. for a one card graphics solution.It would make a great budget gamer system.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Comb [...] mbo.212169
Don't get the 9950, please. It is not economically viable... because in the long run, you will be paying more for it due to its very poor power consumption levels. That cpu idle's worse than others load, along with being very slow and barely able to overclock. Not very impressive with games either. For the price of a 9950, you could get a Phenom II X3 720BE, 3 cores but 3 fast and efficient cores. Even with quad core enabled apps, this triple would probably still outperform the 9950, while using a lot less power, on both idle and load, not to mention it can oc very well. Very few games currently use 4 cores anyways.
Well over at Compaq support it says that it supports the Phenom II CPU's (triple core and quad core).It doesn't specify which ones though and it's an AM2+ socket board.
I would take care on choosing the CPU.A good choice probably would be the AM2+ 3.0 Ghz Phenom II X4 940 (since that was released a while ago) or perhaps the AM3 Phenom X3 720.Even so it's hard to tell.
It says that it's a Pegatron Motherboard Model M2N68-LA which also is an ASUS made motherboard but designed for HP.Looking here
http://support.asus.com/cpusupport [...] uage=en-us under M2N68 there is no LA modification to the model number but under M2N68
some BIOS revisions for support of the Athlon X2 7750 were either 0416 or 0512.
The Phenom II X4 940 needed the earlier 0416 BIOS so if I were to guess I would say that it's probably good without a BIOS update.The Phenom II X3 720 needs the BIOS revision of 0502.
What you should perhaps also do is contact Compaq support and see if upgrading the CPU to the 3.0 Ghz Phenom II X4 940 would be O.K. just to confirm it.
Otherwise you are taking a risk.
If it is true you have the Athlon X2 7750 already, you'll see very little improvement in games moving to a Phenom X4. Very few games can use more than 2 cores, and that Athlon uses the same core and architecture as the Phenom. You'll need a Phenom II if you want to see any noticable performance gains.
What do you have for a video card? If your using the integrated than that is what you need to change to improve gaming.
More and more games are befitting from having 3-4 cores, but I'd have to agree 7750 to 9950 is a poor upgrade for gaming. The Phenom II X3 720 is far better for that purpose. See this article: http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 304-9.html