One of my friends asked if I had a CPU that he could upgrade his older gaming system to. I said I had one but was going to check with Computerhope prior to the upgrade.
He has a Dell Dimension 4600 which came with a Pentium 4 2.4Ghz and he had a GeForce 8800GT AGP video card in it with 768MB RAM running Windows XP Home SP3.
The motherboard is an Dell E210882 socket 478.
Here is a CPU comparison between what he is already running and the Celeron D that I could give him. It looks like the advantage would be SSE3 instruction support and 400Mhz faster, but at the cost of 256k less L2 Cache and a slightly greater power draw.
Is the CPU upgrade for 400Mhz faster and SSE3 instructions worth the loss of 256k of 512k L2 cache?I might just refer him to buying a HT CPU on ebay, but I think he was looking for a free upgrade vs spending money since he is only planning on running this computer until the end of this year and then buying one around christmas when they have black friday deals.
The games he plays on this are the following that work ok.
Diablo II
Torchlight
Fable
Hearthstone
Starcraft
steam indie games ... the few that can run on old hardware
( + some free to play mmorpg's and flash games on facebook etc )
The CPU is the bottleneck as for I have doubts that the 8800GT is able to process at 100% utilization because of the CPU bottleneck.
The older game titles run the same speed as they always have, but the newer indie and flash games etc are starting to lag and he said it must be the single core pentium 4 that is doing it since the 8800GT is an ok video card. Also not sure if his video card is running at 4x or 8x. Thinking it might be 4x given the system age and fact that its a base model dell tower. I looked for a CPU list for the motherboard and came up empty although I found this:
Here is the Dell spec for the board: Microprocessor::: IntelŪ PentiumŪ 4 that runs at 2.26, 2.4, 2.533, 2.66, 2.8, or 3.06 GHz internally and 533 MHz externally, or 2.4, 2.6, 2.8, 3.0, 3.2, or 3.4 GHz internally and 800 MHz externally
from here:
http://forums.techguy.org/hardware/475688-upgrade-processor-dell-board-e210882.htmlThinking the Celeron D 335 socket 478 2.8Ghz although not listed might work. But without a true CPU listing for the motherboard it might be trial and error to see if it will run the CPU or not and a BIOS update would be done before the swap if not version A12.
CPU Comparison here:
http://www.cpu-world.com/Compare/659/Intel_Celeron_D_335_vs_Intel_Pentium_4_2.4_GHz_%28RK80532PE056512%29.html
