Can this be made any better or upgraded?

Magic_x_uk

Magic_x_uk

Magic_x_uk

Soldato
Joined
11 Oct 2005
Posts
5,718
Location
Derbyshire
Can this desktop computer be upgraded to anything worth while cheaply.

These are the main components inside it.

motherboard: ASUS A7V8X-X

CPU: AMD XP 3000+ 2.17HGz (not sure what 'socket' it is)

2x256mb ram memory.


Hard drives and graphics card I am not to bothered about etc.

Running XP


Many thanks to anyone that can recommend anything with this.
 
That's probably a Socket A (socket 462) Barton core cpu. If i remember right there was only the 3100+ (2.2Ghz) and 3200+ (2.3Ghz) that were faster so not worth upgrading. Time for a new rig i am afraid.
 
Stick more ram in it, a decent cooler and OC it to within an inch of it's life.

I have a similar machine working in the lab and with win 7 it runs perfectly well.
 
The board uses old DDR memory - so it can be upgraded but compared to prices of modern RAM (like DDR3 and even DDR2) it is expensive. This is what the motherboard specs say about memory:

3 x DDR DIMM Sockets
Max. 3 GB unbuffered PC2100 / PC1600 non-ECC SDRAM Memory (PC3200 Max. to 2 banks only / PC2700 Max to 4 banks only)
Click to expand...

You can get a single 1GB DDR PC3200 memory stick for £15-20. Therefore you could replace your old RAM with one of these sticks to double your memory (I wouln't suggest trying to mix the new RAM with your old stuff). Or run two of these 1GB sticks to get a total of 2GB memory for ~£30.

For running XP 512MB really isn't a lot, while 2GB is pretty much the performance sweet spot, so doing this upgrade would provide a decent performance increase.

Apart from a memory upgrade there really isn't much else you can do other than upgrade the core system (motherboard/CPU/RAM) entirely or buy an SSD. If you don't do a lot of CPU-heavy stuff, but do use a lot of applications that use the storage drive a lot then you going for an SSD (even on such an old system) would provide a significant performance boost in usually hard drive-bottlenecked scenarios.

Also, you mention the graphics card shouldn't be worried about. May I ask what you mainly use the system for? Since increasingly applications are using the power of modern graphics cards to accelerate their performance. If you are using applications like this then (depending on what card you are currently using) buying a cheap second-hand AGP card like the HD 3850 would give you a nice performance boost for not much cash.
 
Last edited:
Only problem with some of the above I see, is SSD would NOT be possible on that motherboard as no SATA Sockets, only IDE. I know you can buy IDE to SATA Adapters. But would there not be some bottleneck.
 
Even if there is a bottleneck with the SSD it should still perform very well compared to your HDD in real world use, not benchmark figures.
 
sata_ide_bc_L.jpg


Something like this, about £10
 
Wow, a Socket A, I had the 3200+ barton about 9 years ago. It was an awesome chip back in its day. On par, or even slightly better than a Pentium 4 as I recall. Back in the days when AMD could actually compete with Intel for CPU performance.
 
Cut your losses, no point in putting money into hardware that is already 6-7years+ old. Worst case you put in more ram, swap out the hdd and the mobo dies.

You should be able to pick up a cheap AMD X2 bundle
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom