Upgrading an Old P4...

[abhong]

have an old Pentium 4 system in the office that is looking to get upgraded...
specs:

P4 1.7GHz (running at 1.5???)
Asus P4T-E
1GB RDRAM
ATI Radeon 64MB AGP Pro with 4x Support

does this mean i can upgrade the graphics card with AGP 4x?
increasing the speed of CPU will help?

 

[Budman]

Looks like a socket 423 with RDram. not much you can do to upgrade that slow pc.

cheaper to just chuck it & buy a Sempron socket 754 system.



EDIT. it's socket 478 so maybe a celeron could fit in there with a bios update.

 

[abhong]

New system sounds great but office really wants me to get a couple of more months out of this...

getting a better P4 wont help?
getting a better graphics card?

 

[Budman]

Originally posted by: abhong
New system sounds great but office really wants me to get a couple of more months out of this...

getting a better P4 wont help?
getting a better graphics card?

you can upgrade the cpu as long as it's 100mhz,and pretty much any AGP card will fit in there even AGP 8X cards are backwards compatible so yes you can upgrade both. 🙂

edit: after reading Asus's site it looks like it supports 100 stock speed and 133 mhz if you OC so getting a P4 should not be a problem. 🙂

http://usa.asus.com/mb/socket478/p4t-e/overview.htm

 

[abhong]

by the way... why sempron?

 

[Mavrick007]

What are you trying to do with this system? If it's for your office, you probably don't need much power and if you do, you will not stick with this system for long even if you do upgrade the cpu or vid card.

 

[abhong]

you are right Mavrick... and so i am really also thinking about the cheapest way to get a new pc...

keep everything else, swap the MB, CPU, RAM and VIDEO...

any suggestions? again, cheaper the better...

this is used for Photoshop mainly...

 

[Mavrick007]

Hehe If you swap the mobo, cpu, ram and video, what else do you have left?
A case, psu and hard drive??

If that's the case, just push for a new machine cause that one is going to be more of a hassle upgrading than it's worth, especially for the office.

 

[Sensai]

if it is just an office pc, it seems OK the way it is now. Photoshop does not need a 3d capable card, and 2D has pretty much stopped advancing in terms of performance and crisp detail. So the radeon 64 is fine, i believe thats equal to a geforce 2 gts. The RDR ram, though not upgradeable but 1 GB is MORE than sufficient. I dunno the details, but I assume this is a basic office setup, not a gaming machine.

The only things I would do if the system is sluggish is to upgrade the CPU if possible to the max compatible and either reformat the drive for a clean OS or get a faster drive itself for a 7200 rpm 8 MB buffer cache.

 

[Vegito]

how big are your rdram.. is it 512x2 or 256x4.. cuz i just sold my rdram last night.. 1gb @ 220 ebay item 6801492103

I had 2 gb rdram... selling the other gb now... that'll prob get me ~400. I use that money to get a x2 3800 + mobo.. you can prob get a regular 3800 and mobo and memory.

if it's 256x4.. i would do the suggested above

 

[stevty2889]

You could put a 2.8ghz 400mhz FSB P4 in there, just make sure it's the 400mhz FSB northwood, there are a lot of differant 2.8's but thats the only one that will work with that board. Probably a bit difficult to find.

Selling that gig of RDRAM alone could likely fund a newer motherboard and a gig of DDR, giving you a lot more options, since RDRAM still sells for rediculous prices.

 

[Vegito]

Originally posted by: stevty2889
You could put a 2.8ghz 400mhz FSB P4 in there, just make sure it's the 400mhz FSB northwood, there are a lot of differant 2.8's but thats the only one that will work with that board. Probably a bit difficult to find.

Selling that gig of RDRAM alone could likely fund a newer motherboard and a gig of DDR, giving you a lot more options, since RDRAM still sells for rediculous prices.

Exactly.. just look at my auction.. thats one plus for intel/rambus 🙂

 

[Mavrick007]

Originally posted by: forcesho

Originally posted by: stevty2889
You could put a 2.8ghz 400mhz FSB P4 in there, just make sure it's the 400mhz FSB northwood, there are a lot of differant 2.8's but thats the only one that will work with that board. Probably a bit difficult to find.

Selling that gig of RDRAM alone could likely fund a newer motherboard and a gig of DDR, giving you a lot more options, since RDRAM still sells for rediculous prices.

Exactly.. just look at my auction.. thats one plus for intel/rambus 🙂

I think the minus' outweigh the pluses since there's no upgrade path for present machines. Get rid of the rambus while you still can cause that's alot of money. Hehe not sure how heavy that is, but it sounds like it's worth more than gold.

 

[imported_goku]

OP, this is likely what you need. http://powerleap.com/PL-P4N.jsp And yes you can upgrade the video card to a modern day card (exclude 7800GTX).
BTW, OP, read up to make sure that upgrade will work (on their site they've got a system checker type thing that you can run on that system and will suggest an upgrade as well.)
http://www.powerleap.com/# (Click the Powerleap Upgrade Configurator) and it will scan your system for potential upgrades.