TLDR: Cpu and SSD upgrade on old system, any pitfalls? AMD Phenom I would like to upgrade my families home office pc, as its a bit sluggish. Its built around a AMD Phenom 2 x2 500 Socket AM3 (938) and the motherboard is a MSI 770-c45(MS-7599) version 1.9 the info I got from CPU-Z I'm thinking of upgrading the cpu to a quad or 6 core cpu, what would people recommend? I was just going to buy a cpu from ebay. https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/770C45#support-cpu shows that an AMD Phenom II X6 (1090T) is compatible , I think thats the most powerfull cpu I can get for it. (Its 125W, my psu is a newish Corsair 550W replaced a few years ago) so I think that will be the way to go. O and an 8800GT my old GPU Do you see any compatiblilty probs with this upgrade? Second upgrade is to add an SSD, reliability is the most important factor. I would like to copy the OS windows 7 Pro, over to it, The C drive partition is currently 250GB and using 150GB. Work is currently saved now on a separate hard disk and backed up I believe I need to get an SATA SSD for straightforward booting/compatibility purposes. and was looking at a Samsung 860 EVO 500GB 2.5” SATA SSD (5 year warrany) about £78+ Is it the write process that is damaging to the SSD? So if I install the OS on it, then the SSD is only being used for read purposes meaning its reliability will be much higher? And after install I make sure the Cach/swap file is off for the SSD and check that TRIM is on. What do you guys think? Anything I should check before hand or lookout for.
1) That CPU is old enough that you might want to consider a mobo + CPU bundle instead using a more recent setup (sticking to DDR3, so probably Haswell/Broadwell or earlier) for a better bang/buck 2) You want to keep your swap file on the SSD, or you lose a big chunk of performance improvement from moving to an SSD. You do not need to worry about writes, modern SSDs have far more write endurance than any client workload could achieve.
Recommendation, pick up machine, walk to nearest dustbin, drop machine in and move on to new one Whilst tongue in cheek, really you will be picking up a fairly expensive unboxed old CPU, it will require superior cooling to an x2 which will be extra outlay if you don't have a good cooler and you'd then be further stressing out ~10year old hardware, if you are using this for anything remotely important it is probably time to refresh your hardware. Windows 7 will no longer receive security updates in a few months. How much DDR3 do you have, with the age I'd guess 4Gb? There are chips out now that have superior processing power with GPU integrated that would better an 8800GT (Ryzen 2XXXG for example) that would provide a better starting point for your upgrade with SSD and a move to win 10. It is of course not as cheap an upgrade, just switching in an SSD will provide a good boost to an old slow HDD based machine even when your motherboard can't support it to its full potential but really a modern system and OS just does everything faster.
Whats your budget and usage? For a simple home office PC (i.e. no gaming), I would seriously consider looking out for an Intel NUC on the bay of fleas. I picked up a 6th gen i3 with 250GB SSD, 4GB RAM and Windows 10 Pro about 9 months ago for just over £200. I upgraded the RAM to 8GB and its an awesome machine for the family to use and is tiny, silent and power frugal as well. For what you would spend on a m/b, CPU, RAM and a copy of Windows 10 I would highly recommend at least looking at the NUC option.
Thanks for the advice. We need a separate pc in the family so, was hoping to boost the old one and build a new one at a later date, something with integrated gpu. Got 8GB of memory , had 16. I believe the extra memory developed a fault with one of the memory sticks (it was second hand). It worked fine for many years, I had some random crashes on startup and removing the memory stopped the issue. I have not got around to testing that memory. You will be surprised how well old pc do all the tasks you need to do. No gaming is done on the pc. I think i'm going to forget upgrading the cpu and just do the SSD
I wouldn't be that surprised as I have done what you are suggesting to a 2010 laptop that I still use, as you say it is still perfectly useful but I shifted mine on to Windows 10, this with the SSD made it noticeably faster as it was not constantly thrashing disk and the OS is a marked improvement on 7. Unfortunately for the laptop its GPU is weak and nothing can be done about it but even so does office and web with ease. Assuming you don't have a good cooler look for a CPU that is within the same wattage value as your current one and get you some extra threads, I shifted my laptop to a slower CPU but 8 threads and felt it was a general improvement, in win10 at least, helpshandle the abundance of active elements on web sites better. with only one stick of RAM you have half the memory bandwidth by the way, all these little things will contribute to a slower machine.
Apparently you can still get win10 cheap and the upgrade to modern board/ram/cpu/sdd could be done around 200 with 2nd hand parts. https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-how-you-can-still-get-a-free-windows-10-upgrade/