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Upgrade?

Bikewer

Penultimate Amazing
Bikewer
Joined
Sep 12, 2003
Messages
13,242
Location
St. Louis, Mo.
My Gateway rig is getting to be a bit long in the tooth, though still performing pretty well.
I do a lot of gaming, and bought this thing about four years ago, with the 1.9 gig Pent 4 processor. I have since upgraded the RAM to 1 gig and added an ATI 9800 pro video card.

A lot of the newer games are specifying a processor with over 2gig speed.

Gateway will sell me a 3 gig Pent 4 for a bit over two hundred bucks. I've never installed a processor, but I've done everything else (drives, memory, cards) and the articles I've seen seem to indicate it's not that hard. I presume I might need a bigger fan/heatsink as well.

Or...Buy a new MB and processor combo, and plug my "stuff" into that. That would give me the PCI express option down the road (limited budget here...)

Or...Overclock? Never done that either, but I understand both the video card and the processor could be tweaked safely as long as I don't push things too far.

No way to afford a new rig at this point.
 
Price the chip from other suppliers and see if you can get it cheaper (I have no idea if you can, I would check first.)

Processor replacements aren't too difficult. I've had the most problems with the CPU fan. I don't get it mounted right, or it's cheap and fails. The CPU will shutdown if it overheats so make sure you have a fan rated for the CPU (Gateway may include the fan)

This is a decent upgrade. What a new motherboard gets you is faster memory speeds via a front-side bus speed increase and probably faster video with a PCI-X video slot. This would require using new memory and a new video card too.

Since you already have a gig of memory, putting money into a processor upgrade is a good idea if you can't afford to replace the whole mobo/cpu/memory.
 
I'd suggest the upgrade, especially if you're a gamer for a number of reasons;

Whilst Dell can often knock out a PC cheaper than you can put one together often they'll use off brand or especially tailored components.

I'm pretty sure you can find a single core 3 gig P4 cheaper than that (newegg is apparently a good place to try)

Once you have the confidence to pull the guts out and rebuild your PC you'll have no qualms about timkering with it in the future

You can build the PC exactly to your specification

Getting a dual PCIe x16 motherboard and a good graphics card now gives you a path for a graphics upgrade in the future along with the most recent mobo features
 
Right now I have a P4 2.6 with a 9800 pro, 1 gig of RAM. so I am in the same bus as you.

It runs everything with low Eye candy fine, but newer games are getting a lot more needy for video memory (Black, when it comes out will probably look like a slide show)

I am not going to upgrade this one any more and my next build will be a AMD FX2 with one of the Nvidia7800GTX with 512M Ram when I can afford it.

If you can only afford to upgrade the chip, make sure that you buy the P4 with the right frontside bus speed and socket.
 
Check out alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuild on Usenet. The people there are extremely helpful and will probably [non-physically] build your system for you if you can explain exactly what you want. They'll probably also be able to point you towards good web resources.
 
Replacing the CPU is easy, and it should come w/ a fan, mine always do.
 
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