Will there be a Performance improvement with..

[Philippine Mango]

an upgrade from celeron 2.2 to 2.4/2.6GHZ? What about Celeron 2.8GHZ? Also would an upgrade to a 2.8GHZ P4 be significant enough to be worth it?

 

[ribbon13]

No.
Decent.
No.

Don't you already have a P42.8?

 

[Philippine Mango]

Originally posted by: ribbon13
No.
Decent.
No.

Don't you already have a P42.8?

Ok I've got a really big problem on my hands.. I fried a 2.2GHZ Celeron in a friends computer and we were already talking about upgrading the system but weren't sure what to upgrade. I ended up frying this processor which obviously means it needs to be replaced. The system is a 845GL with PC2100 ram which totally sucks and I'm now torn to whether or not we should just build her a new system or not. She is very low on money and probably the most amount of money she will be able to fork out on this system is about $300. When she first came to me, she came to me because she needed a larger HDD but at the same time the system was running very slowly.

So now I'm torn between upgrading this already POS system or just building her an entirely new system (with some older components). I'm willing to give her some parts to get her off to a good start with a decent machine.

 

[akugami]

Probably better off gettingher a new system. List what parts you can give her and see if we can figure out a decent machine to upgrade to. Getting her a S754 Sempron would probably be the best bang for te buck.

 

[Philippine Mango]

Yea I was also thinking that a newer machine would make sense since the memory in this machine is such a bottleneck. Any ideas for a machine that is about $300? I'm willing to fork in about $50 for her computer.

 

[ribbon13]

If you could swing it ->
$90 MSI RS480
$146 ADA3000BIBOX
$88 MPXD42D-2K

 

[Leper Messiah]

Originally posted by: ribbon13
If you could swing it ->
$90 MSI RS480
$146 ADA3000BIBOX
$88 MPXD42D-2K

and its actually $15 cheaper than that, with the MIR. not bad for a GB of ram.

324-14=309. Hope you have a GPU and other stuff to give her though.

 

[Philippine Mango]

Her biggest need before this fiasco was a larger HDD. Any ideas for the HDD that would fit into this budget? I can't remember, is MSI of good quality/moderate quality or is it like epox, PC Chips and ECS?

 

[Philippine Mango]

Oh guys, Um wouldn't this be a better IDEA for the ram? http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...&STARTPAGE=1&FTVAR_FORUMVIEWTMP=Linear
$62 for mushkin ram seems like a MUCH better idea + mushkin=quality right?

 

[akugami]

L3p3rM355i4h - The system ribbon13 listed wouldn't need a video card. It has pretty decent onboard video that's slightly below a Radeon X300 video card. That's damned good for onboard video if you're not a hardcore gamer.

What size was her old HD? Circuit City and Best Buys has 120GB HD's for $50 after rebate this week which is pretty good. If you don't want to deal with rebates, you can get an 80GB HD from Newegg at about $60. If you need a case, Newegg is having a 99 cent shipping sale.

Add in the HD and it would run roughly $350-370.

Assuming she'll recycle her old case/psu (hopefully the psu is not too bad), floppy drive, optical drive, mouse & keyboard and monitor.

 

[Philippine Mango]

I just bought her a 160GB Seagate HDD today for $100 at frys ($50 mail in rebate). She originally had a 40GB drive and she says she filled it up. She litterally has no money so I ended up replacing her processor with a slightly slower one (she had a 2.2, ordered a 2GHZ). Do you think she will notice a 200MHZ slower processor? I was not able to get her any more ram for her craptacular system because I was $10 short. I hope she will be fine with the system she currently has for a while, I plan to do some tweaks in windows XP to speed up the machine and reduce ram usage.

She still plans on building a newer machine but currently she doesn't have the money. She will not be able to recycle the optical drives from the machine or the ram because it's only PC2100 ram. Also since it's a gateway, she can't use the case either but its fine since her mother will be getting the system once she builds it.

 

[wampa]

Since you mentioned that it is an old system, it really depends on what she uses this computer for. If she basically surfs the web and check's her email, I doubt that she'll notice. If she is a gamer (plays Doom 3 or HL2 etc.), then there might be a perceivable difference. But I am guessing the GPU would be the bottleneck and not the CPU.

 

[andy nowotny]

absolutely no

 

[Philippine Mango]

She is currently using onboard video for the computer and was playing warcraft online but her subscription has ended (she might renew it). Otherwise it's mostly for e-mail and crap like that.

 

[Philippine Mango]

I asked her about her gaming habits and she said the only PC game she plays is warcraft online so I think I may go the sempron route which will make the budget a lot smaller.