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Upgrade from P4 2.8GHz?

J

jgbishop

Senior member
I currently have a Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processor, and it's starting to show its age in some of the latest games. What's a good replacement for it? The latest processors all don't mention clock speed, so I have no idea what's better than what.
 
Well, I'm open to replacing my motherboard as well. The P4P800 I have is (IIRC) the oldest component in my machine...

But, whatever I replace it with, must support Serial ATA drives and have an AGP slot.
 
You planning to stick to Intel? Or are you willing to entertain going AMD? And AMD CPU will be way faster than going Intel but you will lose HT. Also, unless you go with a VIA/SIS chipset, you'll need to replace your RAM with DDR2 if you go Intel LGA775.
 
I think I may be willing to go either way (Intel or AMD). But let's stick to Intel for the moment. What options are available?
 
Well, your pentium 4 northwood should be between a 3.0-3.2 prescott, performance-wise (particularly in games), so you'd have to go for the high-end (3.6-3.8GHz) to notice a significant performance improvement. If you have one of the compatible ASUS motherboards then you could go pentium M as well, though I'm a bit hesistant to recommend those unless you're familiar with them. Have you entertained the notion of overclocking? Pentium Ms and A64s are pretty good at this (the P4 overclocks well but requires a lot more care and the power consumption increase quite a bit as well).

Also, what video card are you using right now? Games experience the most impact from the video card, so an upgrade there may take care of all your performance woes (unless you want insane framerates, as the CPU will hold back your maximum framerate at some point).
 
As far as my graphics card is concerned, I've got an eVGA 6800 GT.

I haven't thought of overclocking ... not sure I want to put that much effort into it.
 
I have a 2.8C. How the heck could it POSSIBLY be showing its age. I would be extremely surprised if anyone could come up with a single consumer program that needed more than a 2.6 CPU
 
got a 2.4C and its at 3.4C running perfectly stable.

have the same mobo. OCing isnt hard...just lock your AGP/PCI, set DRAM frequency to 400 (1:1 ratio), then crank up FSB slowly...

but to get above 3Ghz, you have to set the DRAM frequency to 333Mhz (5:4 ratio), which sets a memory divider. from what i hear, the mhz increase offsets the memory performance loss. but, i have mine at 283FSB at 5:4. for everyday computing, i usually go with 3.0C on 1:1, or for heavy gaming/LAN parties, i go with 3.4C (283FSB 5:4).

also, make sure you are comfortable with your CPU temps, as they WILL go up quite a bit. mine idles around 45. goes up to 52C when overclocked at 3.4C.

hope that helps!
 
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