Can my PSU handle this CPU upgrade?

[bottlenecked]

Hey guys, I'm trying to upgrade the processor in my Dell Dimension 2400 since i found a 2.8 ghz Pentium 4 northwood for 5 bucks and i currently have a 2.4 ghz celeron in it. I'm just worried that I don't have enough power to support this upgrade. Here's the system now:

200 W PSU
2.4 ghz celeron
ATI Radeon 9250 pci GPU
1 GB ram (2 x 512)
usb mouse and keyboard
usb flash drive
dvd-rom drive
ide 60 gb hdd ( i think it's 5400 rpm )
HTO striker 7.1 pci sound card

Will my power supply be likely to give out on me if i switch the processor to a 2.8 ghz Pentium 4 northwood??

 

[nitrous9200]

I doubt it. The power usage couldn't be that much greater for a similar generation Celeron and P4, especially if the thing isn't under full load all the time.

It was ever such a long time ago that I swapped out a Celeron 2.0 for a Pentium 4 2.0 (similiar to what you're doing, basically, except the clock speeds are lower) and that thing was running everything with a 250W PSU, no problem.

 

[BoomerD]

You SHOULD be fine. I have several P4 processors in the "junk closet."

I didn't realize anyone even wanted them anymore...

(I think the fastest one is a Socket 478 3.06 Northwood 533FSB)

 

[bottlenecked]

yes, sadly that 3.06 you have would be the fastest that this board could handle 🙂 Too bad on ebay it's like twice the price of the 2.8. I know this system is really old. In fact I call it "old reliable" because I bought it back in '04 and it's still running without problems.

Unfortunately, my lga775 board crapped out along with the corsair Vx550w PSU in my newest build. I hope that's all that's wrong with it at least. I'll be very sad if my 8800 ultra is bad too, but who knows? Right now I just can't afford much more than a 5 dollar upgrade for this ancient backup system.

When I do get an extra 200 bucks though, I plan to go with a core i3-2100 and an h61 board for it with some cheap ram. That way if my video card is bad, at least I will have the intel HD graphics as a backup until i can get myself a radeon hd 6850 or possibly something a step above it.