P4 Board compatible with ssd?

[Rocket62]

I have a working Dell Pentium 4 8300 series and have interest in installing SSD, Rather than buying a new computer. I also intend on changing from XP to Win.7. The current HD is 250GB. Can you offer any suggestions? The way I figure I am looking at about 5 to $600 compared to over a thousand.

 

[Supernova1138]

The SSD should work, but at severely reduced speeds, as your motherboard is so old it only has SATA 1.5Gbps, most SSDs today will fully saturate a SATA 6Gbps interface. Still, the SSD will be considerably faster than your HDD. Your motherboard may not also support AHCI storage mode, which will also hurt performance.

As for Windows 7, you can run the 32 bit version of the OS, but not 64 bit, you have a Northwood Pentium 4, and none of those support 64 bit. Your motherboard also only supports a maximum of 4GB of RAM, so 64 bit support wouldn't help you too much anyway. To run Windows 7 well you also probably should get more RAM, 1GB really isn't enough, the problem is your motherboard only takes DDR RAM, which is obsolete and hasn't been manufactured in years, so it's going to be harder to find, and will be quite expensive.

All told, you're probably better off buying a new system if you have the funds for it, even a cheap $400 prebuilt system will run circles around your old machine, even without an SSD. You don't need to spend over $1000 on a computer if your computing needs aren't that intense, and since you seem content to stick with a ten year old system, you probably don't need a high end CPU, high end graphics card, and a ton of RAM to do what you want to do.

 

[Rocket62]

To put this into perspective the fastest p4 cpus are slower then most smartphones with decent cpu. Your pc at the moment is worth around $30. Anyway a new $500 pc will get you a cpu thats 10x faster then your current p4 while taking 1/4 of the electricity cost so don't bother upgrading junk and adding an ssd to it and it most likely won't even work on your machine.

Look on dell outlet refurbished desktops and I am sure you will find great i3 i5 i7 machines for $500.

 

[Rocket62]

Thanks you are absolutely right an SSD would be slowed by the slow board and would not be able to perform at its normal rate. I'll have to look at another system and replace what I have.