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I am thinking of upgrading the CPU in my DELL Dimension 8200.
Can this be relatively easy for a beginner with not much experience other than installing PCI cards/memory etc?
Also, what CPU's are compatible with this system? Am I better off just buying a completely new system, or would a cpu upgrade breathe some new life into her?
What are the actual specs for your computer? It depends on how much of a performance boost you are looking for. If you really want to see an increase you will need to go for a new computer as that one only supports up to 2.8GHz Pentium CPUs. On the other hand, if you are on a budget, then upgrading the processor isn't much more difficult than installing a PCI card.
As goates says, what is your current spec? While upgrading the CPU isn't a big job you might not get the results you expect. Doing a fair amount of research is important. Start by find out exactly what make and model of motherboard you have. This will provide info on what speed of CPU it can handle (Your link is a good place to start but opening up the PC and seeing what's written on the board will give a definitive answer). Along with the cpu speed also find out the front side bus (FSB) speed, the ide speed and the type of memory you can use. Then see what you actually have, i.e. your CPU speed and FSB, your harddrives ide speed (tranfer rates) and spin speed, and how much memory you have. Then see where you have room to improve. If, for example, your hard drive spins slow (5400) and tranfers at 66Mhz then upping your CPU isn't the proirity cause your PC will still be slow getting info of the disk. Same applies if you are short of memory. What you want to do is make sure you aren't just shifting the bottlenecks to different parts of the system.
I just did a quick check online of the cost of upping your CPU and harddisk to maximise the potential of your mobo, and adding some memory. Cost should be £110 for a 2.8Ghz/533FSB CPU, £40 for a 80Gig harddrive and (this can't be right!!!!!) Euros240.00 for a 512Mb chip (What are PC800 chips made of?). Compare this cost against getting a new machine to see if it's worth it.
The PC800 RDRAM sticks are so expensive because they are RDRAM, not the far more common DDR SDRAM. I ran into this problem while upgrading my brothers' Dimension 8200. You also need to install the sticks in pairs. No ifs, ands or buts. Intel tried to go with RDRAM for the first P4 motherboards, but the modules were too expensive for the performance gain.
Biscuit Chucker,
Let us know what you want the increased performance for (even it's just to have a faster system). Then we can give you a better answer as to what to do.
Pentium 4 2.26 Ghz, 640 Mb RAM. Have a NVidia Geforce FX 5600 with 256 RAM. Not sure about HDD, although I am more than happy to get a second HDD if you have any recommendations as long as it's not too pricey (mine's pretty chocker)
I would just like a bit more grunt-I like to play the odd game or too like Flight Sim, and would like to get some of the newer ones like Brothers in Arms and Silent Hunter 3 and would like to max all the eye candy without driving like a steam roller. I thought I might be better off getting a higher end graphics card but wouldn't I need a better CPU as well?
If I go about buying a kick arse graphics card, it might end up being cheaper to buy a whole new system, just sounded like a waste of money if I processor upgrade might only cost 2-300 AUD?
Stoney, your numbers sound good to me, I don't mind spending around that amount as long as 2.8 will give me a pretty good system for gaming? Is the jump from 2.26 to 2.8 a good hike in power? Would I need to install a more powerful cooling fan for the 2.8 processor?
Biscuit Chucker, looking at your spec now compared to what you could possibly get to is kind of like comparing a 2.5 litre car engine against a 3 litre. Sure you'll get an increase in performace but not as much as you'll feel real happy with. Ideally you would want to be able to use a 3+Ghz cpu with a 800FSB but that would mean a new motherboard. You can get decent mobo for £60 that will also run serial ATA harddrives and faster memory, but you can see the price escalating rapidly. I'll PM a few links of the kind of kit I'm referring too but I suspect you'll be better of with a whole new PC with better monitor, graphics card, etc. I've got a friend who has a policy of only upgrading when he can double the speed of his current kit. He hasn't been disappointed so far.
I think you would be better off with a new system if you want to be running games with settings maxed out. Have a look at an Athlon 64 based system too. The Athlons consistently beat the Pentiums when it comes to games, and can be cheaper too for similar performance, games wise. Check out the link below for some decent mid range PC components.
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