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Antique CPU question

mattyfez

mattyfez

mattyfez

Soldato
Joined
12 Apr 2007
Posts
12,352
Hi all going to upgrade my Nana's PC at the weekend.

Currently it's
E5500? Pentium Dual core Wolf Dale
2gb ram
Mechanical hard drive
Windows 10

I have bought
2gb additional ddr2 ram
SSD drive
Q8400 York field quad

Now I only paid £12 for the quad so no great concern but have since realised its simply the quad version of the chip she already has. The clock speeds are nearly identical.

Bearing in mind the pc is only used for light desktop usage, was this a pointless upgrade?
I'd imagine there would be some gains as background tasks would be more spread out over 4 cores?


Thanks
 
Is swapping out the dual core for the 'same' quad core worth it, seeing as she's not going to be running multiple large apps. Just uses a browser really.

I know it certainly won't hurt, but will there be any benefit.
 
Some. Depends how multithreaded the apps are. Web browsers are utilising more threads nowadays.

The SSD will transform the the system responsiveness.
 
Yeh the HDD is very much the bottleneck.

I figured I'd put a quad core in there at the same time just for the hell of it really, but not sure of it would be a waste of time given the usage.
 
mattyfez said:
Hi all going to upgrade my Nana's PC at the weekend.

Currently it's
E5500? Pentium Dual core Wolf Dale
2gb ram
Mechanical hard drive
Windows 10

I have bought
2gb additional ddr2 ram
SSD drive
Q8400 York field quad

Now I only paid £12 for the quad so no great concern but have since realised its simply the quad version of the chip she already has. The clock speeds are nearly identical.

Bearing in mind the pc is only used for light desktop usage, was this a pointless upgrade?
I'd imagine there would be some gains as background tasks would be more spread out over 4 cores?


Thanks
Click to expand...

Hi,

Of course the quad core will show its advantages. But you had to buy the Q9000 series. Those when overclocked are pretty damn good CPUs even for today's applications.

Try to overclock the one you got.
 
Thanks but not interested in overclocking it.
Stock cooler and limited mobo/bios options..

The single thread performance of both chips is basically identical, so the only difference is 2 more cores.
 
As MagicBoy has said, an SSD will make everything more responsive and faster. As for the Q8400, it won't make a huge difference but at £12 does it really matter ? The extra ram i fell will make difference as well, particularly with modern browsers using as much ram as they do.
To be honest, i think it's a sensible and certainly not a "pointless upgrade"
 
kitfit1 said:
As MagicBoy has said, an SSD will make everything more responsive and faster. As for the Q8400, it won't make a huge difference but at £12 does it really matter ? The extra ram i fell will make difference as well, particularly with modern browsers using as much ram as they do.
To be honest, i think it's a sensible and certainly not a "pointless upgrade"
Click to expand...

The SSD will make a difference to those moments when there is a hard drive transfer bottleneck.
In all other situations, the CPU will be the bottleneck. Or the RAM.

mattyfez said:
Thanks but not interested in overclocking it.
Stock cooler and limited mobo/bios options..

The single thread performance of both chips is basically identical, so the only difference is 2 more cores.
Click to expand...

Great ! These 2 more cores mean 100% more resources than the dual-core.

You have also support for faster RAM (from 800 MHz up to 1333 MHz) and double the cache (from 2 MB only up to 4 MB L2 cache).
 
Yeh I thought the additional cache would be a plus.

All the ram is just generic ddr2 800.

This ram is very cheap second hand but I can't remember how many ram slots the board has.
If it has 4 slots I might put another 2gb in to make 6gb total.

Thanks for all the replies
 
4K8KW10 said:
The SSD will make a difference to those moments when there is a hard drive transfer bottleneck.
In all other situations, the CPU will be the bottleneck. Or the RAM.
Click to expand...

Sometimes i despair at the stupidity of some answers on this forum. This is an old mobo, old Tech and operated by on old aged pensioner. Of course she will see her computer boot faster and respond faster with an SSD over an old Mechanical HD. Read the OP's first post, it's only used for lite desktop use.......................there will be no "bottlenecks" with the cpu or the ram it's the OP's Grandmother...........................she's not playing the latest games would be a good guess.
 
kitfit1 said:
Sometimes i despair at the stupidity of some answers on this forum. This is an old mobo, old Tech and operated by on old aged pensioner. Of course she will see her computer boot faster and respond faster with an SSD over an old Mechanical HD. Read the OP's first post, it's only used for lite desktop use.......................there will be no "bottlenecks" with the cpu or the ram it's the OP's Grandmother...........................she's not playing the latest games would be a good guess.
Click to expand...

Haha, except that internet browsers like faster CPUs.
 
mattyfez said:
Bearing in mind the pc is only used for light desktop usage, was this a pointless upgrade?
Click to expand...

Definitely not pointless, 2gb ram is definitely not enough - so between stretching that and adding an SSD, will definitely make a noticable difference. The quad might not make much of a difference, but at that price it was worth doing anyway (it'll help ensure background things like antivirus or windows update don't cause slow downs).

Seems like a great choice (rather than what most do - chuck old serviceable kit for latest and greatest budget stuff that isn't necessarily much better)
 
Armageus said:
But do you actually need a 5ghz chip just to browse? No...
Click to expand...

No, but there is a difference of loading times of internet sites between, for example, Core 2 Duo at 1.5 GHz with 2 MB L2, Core 2 Duo at 2.2 GHz, and Core 2 Quad Q9450 at 3.2 Ghz with 12 MB L2 cache.
It just makes everyhing instant, without the SSD, just an ordinary mechanical drive.
 
Well indeed, it's a cheap upgrade (other than the SSD, I bought the £50 SSD brand new).

She's was saying about getting a new PC, which is fine, but then she's looking at about £300, rather than £60.

Worst case scenario I suppose she's now got a new SSD so if it still sucks, that's a few quid she doesn't need to allocate if I build her something more modern.
 
mattyfez said:
Well indeed, it's a cheap upgrade (other than the SSD, I bought the £50 SSD brand new).

She's was saying about getting a new PC, which is fine, but then she's looking at about £300, rather than £60.

Worst case scenario I suppose she's now got a new SSD so if it still sucks, that's a few quid she doesn't need to allocate if I build her something more modern.
Click to expand...

OP, stick with it..................she will be impressed. No need to stick our OAP's with expense they don't need.
 
I'd like to do some before and after benchmarks, but in all honesty it's pretty sluggish as it is, so I'm not going to bother, if it goes from sluggish to nippy for general use, that's what I'm aiming for.
 
I'll probably stick an SSD in my Dad's machine, which is similar spec Pentium E. Bumped it from 2Gb to 4Gb when the original RAM stopped working a couple years ago as it's what I had lying around. He's since upgraded it to Windows 10 himself, but complains it's slow in responses for a few minutes after it boots. I've got a spare E6750 kicking around out of my old machine, but can't see the point in updating it for a bit of cache.

I'll SSD it only I think. If something else fails in the future then it's new PC time. Throwing a cheap quad-core or a graphics card at it wouldn't really make any noticeable improvement. The SSD, he'll notice.

Oh and for the person saying SSD transfer rates make the difference ... it isn't in this use case. It's the near zero access time that makes the responsiveness difference.
 
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