Pentium d 940 good upgrade for gaming?

A Pentium D is actually a downgrade from an E2140. The E2140 is the much better Conroe architecture. The bad news is that its likely stuck at 1.6 ghz making the Pentium D slightly faster......if you had a homebuilt system you could overclock the E2140 but Dell BIOS usually prevents overclocking.

Clock for clock the Conroe chips are roughly ~40% faster than the older netburst based Pentium 4/Pentium D chips.

What are the rest of your specs? We need to know what kind of power supply you have to tell you what kind of video card you can upgrade to. Likely its a 300w or less Dell cheapo model that will limit you to a HD 4670 or less.

That's why I asked.. I figured there was more to the story than just the 1.6 and 3.2 numbers if you knew the inside scoop.

unfortunately I have the chepo 250W power supply, but I would be willing to change it out for a bigger supply if it makes a big difference.

it came with 1Mb of ram but I added 2 more. [edit] ... I forgot, I also added a Radeon X550 video card.

Ok so the bad news is I checked system requirements.


Minimum System Requirements

Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.4 GHz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM) 64 2800+ processor or any 1.8Ghz Dual Core Processor
Display Card: NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 6600 or better or ATI(R) Radeon(R) 9800Pro or better
Memory: 512MB
Free Disk Space: 8GB
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP


Recommended System Requirements

Processor: 2.4 GHz dual core or better is recommended
Display Card: 3.0 Shader Support recommended. Nvidia Geforce 7800 or better or ATI Radeon X1800 or better
Memory: 1024MB
Free Disk Space: 8GB
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP

I really dont see you playing at all except at the lowest resolutions. I would say get a HD 4650 or 4670 as they are low power and probably would be OK with your existing power supply. Anything more would likely be bottlenecked by the low CPU clock speed.

You meet the minimum requirements. Overclock your CPU and you should have no problem playing the game. (get a 9600GSO or 4670 ~$50 if you can)

He has a Dell.....not really overclock friendly.

He can probably get a used dual core (Pentium Dual or Core2) on ebay for ~$50

If he's not able to swap out the CPU, I'd say he should go for it...he meets he minimum specs and can play it on medium probably.

I'm going to upgrade the CPU.

I wanted to get a bigger power supply too so I can upgrade to a better video card, but the dang slimline case is screwing me. I can't find anything that will fit. Buy.com has the Radeon HD 4670 1GB DDR3 for $101 and the DDR2 version for $70. I'm going to pick up the ddr2 version. I don't think my crappy dell will notice the difference for an extra $30!

Buy from Newegg or Tigerdirect...both are usually cheaper than BestBuy.

Also, 1GB of RAM on a 4670 is a waste since it can't use it.