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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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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
 
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.
 
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.
 
Yeh I'm under no illusions that the SSD will put a bit of wind up it's bum, even if it has to page, it will page a lot quicker.

On the question of ram, this system will be running miss matched sticks so won't be running duel channel, unless I get lucky.

Not sure how bad that is, I figured quantity is better than quality in this scenario, haha
 
darael said:
Something to watch out for is the existing RAM - it might only be DDR2-400, but the Q8400's 1333MHz FSB will demand DDR2-667.
Click to expand...

Didn't think of that, the new second hand ram is ddr2 800, I'm reasonably sure the existing stick is to as I built the machine originally but I can't really remember, board is a fairly run of the mill msi board, no idea what model but has some basic OC options, but no fancy heat pipes or heatsink or anything like that.
 
My local second hand electronics shop lists a Ddr2 400 4gb stick in stock for £8 on the website.

I'm not doing the upgrade till Friday (she doesn't live locally) so I wonder if it's worth picking that up just in case.
 
The stuff I bought is ddr2 6400, 800mhz, sorry for the confusion, I called it 400mhz as it's double data rate.

That should work right? I hope so as I can't remember if what's currently in the system so I bought another 2gb stick today, so she'll end up with either 4gb or 6gb total.
 
Armageus said:
Will be absolutely fine (even if the existing stuff is 667mhz) as it should automatically adjust to the slowest. (The existing is unlikely to be ddr2 3200 400mhz, as that was early skt 775 - p4 era)
Click to expand...


Cheers, I've a feeling her current 2gb stick is one of my cast offs, which will be a fancy (for the era) ocz ddr2 800mhz, but i can't remember.
 
I only upgraded from socket 775 about 12 months ago myself, and that was mainly as I needed a dx11 capable gpu, I had a Gtx285 which was fine but it was limited to dx10 games but there was no point buying that alone so I upgraded to a skylake i5.
 
andy_mk3 said:
I think s775 was a massive leap forward.

My old Q6600 system still lives on in my Gran's PC, it's been on 24/7 for nigh on 10 years now! It used to be od'd but back to stock now. But with 4gb ram and a really old SSD, 3.5" OCZ Vertex2 I think? It's actually as quick as any modern PC for internet browsing and Word etc. I think it's still got some years left in it yet.
Click to expand...

That's my thinking, I was rocking an overclocked 6600go and aside from the fact I had a mechanical HDD, it's a perfectly good system..

So hopefully this upgrade with the quad, more ram and ssd, it should fly for general Interneting.
 
Well everything is working, system runs very well now.
Slight issue though, it idles at 60c, and can ramp up to 100c when installing an application for example.

I did a botch with the TIM though just wiped it with tissue and put new Tim on, so I'll have to clean it properly and do it again.
I'm just wondering if the stock intel cooler is up to the job
 
Sounds like the cooler is the cheaper one then.
However I have redone the thermal paste properly this time and also realised one of the clamps wasn't all the way home.. it's now idling at about 45c. Doh.
 
Oh Yeh, it runs great, it's not as nippy as my modern i5, but that's overclocked and blah blah but for surfing the net and general desktop duties it's not a million miles away.
Put it this way, if you were to use it for its intended purpose you wouldn't have any complaints with it. I. E. Not for gaming or video editing lol!

She's happy with it anyway and saved a wad of cash over buying a new tower.
 
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