I've been doing some upgrading on my older PC that I've had since about 2003-2004. I know it can't be transformed into a beast but I know this old machine still has some potential, lol. I did some research and it seems my motherboard supports "Socket 478" and there are a few of them on Newegg for around 60 bucks or so. Would this be a decent processor and how much of a performance difference would I notice over my 2.02 GhZ P4 Processor? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116027R Would this improve my performance in gaming? I know it's not one of those "Duel-Cores" but surely 3 Ghz would show some improvement, right? It says it has "Hyper-threading", is this a good thing? I know after installing 1GB of RAM I noticed a massive increase in performance on my machine. I went from 256mb's to 1gb and the difference was amazing. My game performance also skyrocketed from stuttering and very long load times to smooth gameplay with load times only being a few seconds.
The difference wouldn't be great in changing processors. upgrade to 2 or 4 gigs of ram instead. What motherboard do you have? Another big difference would be getting a new motherboard and a newer cpu. What are your specs on the entire computer?
The biggest performance increase would probably be a Dual Core processor and (if possible) more RAM. 2GB is probably enough, although YMMV.
I agree on 2Gb ram likely being enough for what you have. What socket 478 processor are you currently running? You could always go on the cheap and get a used one on eBay or something to tide you over. Also, what video card are you running. Most likely you have an AGP slot for video, so wouldn't want to spend much, if any money on that. Again, there might be a used card that would be a couple steps up, depending on what you have.
I'll probably buy another Gigabyte of ram for that extra boost. As for my video card I recently purchased a BFG GeForce FX 5700 Ultra on EBay for 30 bucks and it's doing pretty well for my needs in gaming. I run HL2 at a good consistant playable frame rate with all settings on High and I can play Lineage II on max settings as well. I'm considering getting a more recent AGP card but I'm going to need to upgrade my power supply because I'm only running on 250 watts. I'm looking to spend around 100 bucks on a newer video card in the future. So would I benefit more from another GB of ram than a new processor? How would that affect my game performance over 1gb? Current PC specs: Pentium 4 Processor 2.02 Ghz 1.2 GBs DDR PC3200 BFG GeForce FX 5700 Ultra (Overclocked) 250 Watt Power Supply
