Can The eMachines ET1331G-03w Be upgraded to a Quad core AMD?

According to what I've read, yes it supports quad core, even six core Phenom chips with the AM3 sockets. There are a couple of odd "BUT's" I want to throw in here though too. One is that there IS a wattage limitation. 65w chips and thats it, so it does knock some chips off the list of what you can use, but there are still a lot that can be used. I think it was the AMD Phenom 910e I saw as the max chip, but you can double check me on their website. The other "but" and this is a big one, depending on where I got info on the motherboard there was mixed infor on whether it was an AM2 or an AM3 cpu socket. I make the assumption that mine is AM3 since AMD lists my current cpu as being available only as an AM3 chip. I brought it up because that might not be the case for all users of this system.

I bought 2 of these systems at the same time, one for me and one for my son. We both love everything but the junk speakers (pretty common for freebie speakers). Oddly our systems weren't identical though. My pc came with a 750gb hard drive and a 300 watt power supply made by FSP Group. My sons came with a 1 tb hard drive but only a 250 watt power supply. I bring up the strange power supply issue for anyone wanting to upgrade their video cards in this machine. If your system has the 300 watt power supply, you can easily support a VERY nice video card by nVidia that even supports DirectX 11 (the GT430) and only cost me $70 to boost my system hugely. For people stuck with the 250 watt supply, I haven't heard of any good cards that you can run in the same class as the GT430. Also, the 430 is a thick card so although you have 1 PCIex16 and 2 PCIex1 (plus a PCI) slots open on your motherboard, one of the PCIex1 slots won't be usable if you get a thick video card like the 430. It was WELL worth it though, to me at least. I still had room for my PCIe audio card so I was happy.

I have collected a huge amount of information on this pc from various part manufacturers so have made a spreadsheet of good upgrades to it in most areas, even the PSU (which i eventually had to replace anyway when I added a small RAID to my pc). If i can save anyone time trying to find info on these systems i'd be happy to do so.

See here about my experience with emachines (I replaced a motherboard with an alternative replacement board (even an upgraded socket type).
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/54953-2-alternative-r...