Do CPU upgrades work?

[Poritz]

I was looking into purchasing an Evergreen Technolgies Spectra cpu upgrade to take my pentium 133Mhz to the supposed 400Mhz the spectra delivers. I was wonder whether or not they work to begin with (would I see it if I ran some cpu diagnostic software), and how it, if it does at all, work. I was looking to hear from someone who had installed one and was impressed, and more imporantly someone who installed it and it did not do much if anything at all to improve the performance. The idea is to bring the computer back up to minimum networking speed for sharing the dsl line and perhaps breath a little more life into it. Look foward to hearing from someone soon.

Poritz

 

[Poritz]

Why does everyone ignore me?

 

[rimshaker]

You will notice some improvement for sure, but you'd still be WAY behind today's minimum cpu power. My oldest system is running a pentium 233mmx, and it's pretty slow. I contemplated about upgrading it as well with Evergreen, just never got around to it. I dunno anyone using an Evergreen upgrade either. With the money you'd spend, you could almost get yourself a nice Duron or Athlon cpu close to 1GHz.

 

[Poritz]

The thing is I can't find a mobo and cpu and case and vga and memory, for $120. If I could I would but that is another story.

 

[Shagger]

Keep your eyes peeled for stuff that's free after rebate in the hot deals forum. I was able to get a 128MB stick of PC133 RAM for free after rebate, a case and mobo (with sound on it) for $70 (the famous Andara deal), a $29 video card (TNT2 Vanta 32MB), and a $70
Athlon 950. It is only slightly more than $120 and I can do SO much more in an hour than a upgrade Evergreen chip can do in a month. The chip itself may process things faster but the Front side bus speed and the Mobo chipset will / are hopelessly out of date. They will be SEVERE bottlenecks to overall machine performance. I'd steer away from a Upgrade chip and save up your pennies for a REAL upgrade.

It may take some doing to compile a bunch of components to build a system from scraps like I did, but if you are patient and get a good deal or two you can build a sweet system for less than $200.

 

[rimshaker]

Yup, very true. Wait around for great deals on hardware. Lilke for example, since thanksgiving, i've managed to get a Ti200 card for $70 at best buy, A 17in samsung monitor for $70 (open box, best buy), 512MB of Crucial memory for $57, and a FREE amd XP2000+ cpu courtesy of the amd roadshow. Not bad for just $200 spent.

 

[googly]

I considered upgrading my 4 year old P-200 MMX system with a Powerleap K3-400 gizmo but decided the $100 could be better spent, coz there wasn't any point in living with a 66 MHz FSB and funky old SIMMs maxed out at 64 Mb. I found someone on FleaBay selling AT mobos with K2-500 for $79 and got 128 MB SDRAM for $20 from CompUsa. Much, much better and a straightforward drop into the old case - besides I sold off the old mobo/CPU & RAM; the EDO SIMMs alone fetched $20.

 

[dahoff]

Poritz, I was in the same boat as you. I had a Pentium 133MHz and I wanted to upgrade it for over a year. I watched Evergreen's product line evolve from the 200MHz upgrade based on the IDT Winchip, then when I saw the 333MHz Spectra, then a couple weeks later the 400MHz Spectra (using the AMD K6-2 CPU), I was a very happy camper. After the rebate it was $100.

To answer your question, YES, it works VERY NOTICEABLY, and it works well. It's stable. It's AMD. I ran some diagnostic software and saw about a 3x performance gain. Plus, it has MMX technology and 3DNow!

I'd be willing to sell you my chip, but I'm in college now and home is 14 hours away. But, the upgrade was awesome at the time (1999 I think), but I don't know if it's worth it (at least to me) now.

I hope this helps. The Spectra does a very good job.