Need cheap upgrade solution.....Help!!!

[DX2Player]

Ok im on a shiity computer right now for reasons not worth going into. Basically I need to make as cheap an upgrade as possible to get acceptible performance, or at least a good improvement over what I got. No major overhaul suggestions please its a temp and dont want to spend much over $100. Ok basically it was a piece of shiit to start so........ Dell Dimension L700CXE with Celeron 700Mhz, 192mb PC100 ram, ATI 7000 PCI card (no AGP slot). Ok there is no way to OC this idiot proof box in BIOS so thats out (not shure I would want to anyways because this computer is so bad it has NO case fans). I looked and it seems I could grab a 1.3 celeron for about $50 and I think it would work but I have no idea if mobo would support. I could also upgrade PCI video card, thinking of either Geforce 4 MX440 or ATI 7500 or maybe ATI 9000 if not to much and I can find at store. Could also probably take out the 64ram stick and put in a 256 or something. Any suggestions on what combo would be the cheapest yet most effective.

For now ill be limping along here

 

[Trashman]

Upgrading from a 5400rpm HD to a 7200rpm HD may give you a slight and cheap performance boost....assumin it has a 5400rpm drive of course.

 

[DTSS]

I build alot of computer at home and upgrade them for friends. Its really tough to upgrade "a previous generation computer" to even come close to todays preformance thats available. However, ask yourself what exactly what are you using the computer for. If you want to do some serious gaming, it will be tough to do w/ some of the newer generation games that are out there. Altough, surfing the internet will be just a fast w/ your present compter than w/ a $3500 bad ass super desktop pc! "Under reason". With that said, there serveral ways to upgrade your old pc. I'd recommend you spend a few more bucks and upgrade this puppy a little more than you think. Problem is, I believe that Dell power supply's are proprietary. You may need a new power supply.

www.essencompu.com - My favorite place to shop online!

$85.00 Abit Motherboard KD7 VIA KT400 AMD Socket A DDR 400 AGP 8X ATA 133 USB 2.0 ATX MB
$69.00 AMD Athlon XP 1700+ 1.47GHz Thoroughbred 3D CPU Retail
$38.00 Crucial Technology 256MB 184pin DDR PC2100


A total $192 bucks

Just these three things will give you a great building platform to upgrade your computer now and future upgrades. With much more preformance than a small upgrade of a $100 for memory a slightly bigger cpu will even give you.
You capablilaty to upgrade even more later down the road w/ the ability to add much more memory! AGP Graphics card and so on! You basically have a brand new computer for less than $200 Bucks. If you decide to go w/ something like this and need any help..let me know. Be glad to help.
Goodluck - Daryl

 

[ChefJoe]

Save your money. Upgrade to a celeron 1.4 or so would be good, but that's tualatin core. You'll have to play with pin wrapping, etc, to get a 1.4 into a 0.7 celeron spot. This is tricky and somewhat dangerous to do (broken pins are common to first timers with the mod). The price you'd pay for that 1.4 p3 based would be better spent saving for a new computer.

You have a dell with no AGP slot, to do a serious upgrade (more than memory, HD) that's semi-approachable for a newbie you'll have to replace the PSU, the case, and motherboard, and the CPU... also, you may need to change to a different memory type when doing all that.

Save your money, then start a home built and run with your PCI graphics card for a while... save more money, then upgrade a few more things.

 

[DX2Player]

Ya I thought of that too but really this is just a semi temp that I dotn want to put to much money into. I basically wanna be able to play wc3 and maybe RTcW decently, dotn mind low settings. Ill probably have the computer for only a month or two before I get my good one back, look at rig at bottom. Dont want to spend much at all. If I have a Celeron 700Mhz socket370 on 810 chipset can I put a 1.3Ghz socket370 in it? How do I know if my mobo can handle it? It would only cost like $50 to do that.

Im not really a newbie I built my P4 2.53 rig I just dont know as much about the older technologies as I do the new.

 

[ChefJoe]

Ok, well, see, if it's an old 810 chipset in a dell, you're likely limited to a non-Tualatin 66 or 100 fsb (dell doesn't include overclocking or special dividers) unless there's the magic 1/4 divider for your PCI bus. That's unlikely. Assuming your celeron is a 100 MHz FSB Cumine (I'm assuming this isn't a slot 1 based system, though it could well be and you've not specified if it is or is not) cores only went up to the P3 1.1 GHz (I have that in my snapstream rig). This would be a healthy upgrade, but these CPUs are very difficult to find. You might need a socket 370 to slot 1 adapter card, probably need a new Heatsink as well, and we cannot tell you if your motherboard actually can be set for a 11x multiplier that this type of cpu would need. You'd end up spending about $100 between the HS, chip, and the paste, and perhaps a slotket adapter card. You should figure out if it's an 810 or an 810 e though, cause the e series did allow 133FSB. Also, 810 chipsets may support tualatin cores, depending on if the bios and manufaturer set your motherboard up to do so.

You would also get a boost from more memory... but not a night and day difference.

Now, the more difficult trick of upgrading these older systems is to wrap tiny wires around certain pins, insulate other pins, and then attach Tualatin core P3/Celerons to these older chipsets. There's many threads about that on this board and others. You'd have to worry about your maximum divider (again). Also, Tualatin Celerons were 100 FSB with a 256 k L2 cache while the Tualatin P3s were 133 FSB (which I don't think your motherboard will support) with a 512 k L2 cache. This would be faster than the P3 1.1 upgrade, but we're not getting beyond P4 2.0 ghz performance levels.

Your ATI 7000 is a good PCI card, I have one. Going higher than that on the PCI bus isn't going to be a big improvement. Your PCI bus will get hosed with graphics, disk access data, etc that will not do much to improve your RTCW playing ability.

So, yeah, maybe do a re-install of the OS so things are squaky clean, but your dell has very little upgrade potential. You have my sympathy, I'm in a similar dead end with my Celeron 1.3 and P3 1.1 homebuilts. I'm going to build a 800FSB intel system soon to combat this.