S478 Processor

[ajones]

Apologies off the bat for this one.. I'm an old-time AMD whore, and haven't used Intel since my P100 days!

A friend of mine has a crappy old Celeron, and it's really struggling when he's playing BF 2142. I'm looking for a cheap upgrade for him, and seeing a P4 Northwood at 2.8GHz, or Prescott at 3Gz for around the 50 quid mark.

Given that he's teaming this up with an X1300 (AGP) and 1GB DDR400, any suggestions as to which I should recomend?

[dave87]

I'm wondering if for similar money you could get a ASRock Dual Sata and 3200 A64, which would give a bigger speed boost. It would be second hand though.

[alsenior]

instead maybe he should consider this instead. http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=136443 cant be much more than a X1300 and it would be a lot faster.

also get a north wood chip. hey run cooler and you can over clock the hell out of some of them

[ajones]

I'm wondering if for similar money you could get a ASRock Dual Sata and 3200 A64, which would give a bigger speed boost. It would be second hand though.

Have thought of this. Got a spare 3500 here, but those ASRock boards are like Venus' armpit. It's easier to get my hands dirty on rockin' horse s**t.

instead maybe he should consider this instead. http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=136443 cant be much more than a X1300 and it would be a lot faster.

also get a north wood chip. hey run cooler and you can over clock the hell out of some of them

He's already got the X1300, just looking for a CPU upgrade. Will try to get a 2.8GHz Northwood one. Should work out a decent upgrade for not much mullah.

[ajones]

Righto.. uncovered that my friend has a Patriot C2640 pre built system, which runs the SIS651 chipset. I can find no reference in the SIS documentation for the chipset that it supports HT, so am presuming that it doesn't. All I can see is that it supports 400/533 FSB Pentium 4s (currently hosting a P4 Celeron at 2.6 GHz).

Before I go down the route of "your stuffed mate", and as dave87 suggested buy a new mobo (which with his OEM XP requires a new copy of Windows as well... just getting that point in before the holier than thou OS licence flamers get their claws out!), can you see any benefit in popping in a better cpu (eg. a 2.8GHz Northwood), or even head into Prescott territory and hope that the mobo can set the clocks correctly?

[Nox]

I reckon my old 2.4 clocked to 3.0 northwood was faster in windows than my amd 3200+ was, but the 3200+ was faster in games. Then i replaced the 3200+ with an opteron 146 and clocked it up to 2.7Ghz and windows became roughly 'even footing' And i'm talking about the feel rather than exact scores here.

Nox