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One last upgrade

King4aDay

King4aDay

King4aDay

Soldato
Joined
4 Sep 2003
Posts
4,428
Location
Cornwall
Hi all,

My rig is starting to show its age (E2160, 650i Ultra, 4GB DDR2 5300, ati 5770), and I was looking at chucking in a second hand CPU to squeeze a little more life out of it.

Given the ram and mobo, what would be my best bet for a replacement processor? Mostly used for Photoshop and casual gaming.

Ta.
 
have you overclocked the chip? if not that would be your best bet as its free, if you have then a quad is the best upgrade to get on that socket, a Q6600 OR Q9X50 and clock that
 
Played around with overclocking, was never able to get anything great out of it (I suspected the ram at the time I think). Been sat on 2.2ghz or something like that for ages.

Happy to try overclocking any replacement but suspect there won't be a huge amount of scope.
 
yeh ram is going to hold you back a lot, if you had some 800mhz + id be highly surprised if you couldnt touch 2.8 on the e2160, if you buy a quad you will have the same issue though on that board 3.2 on a quad would be achievable but the ram is the issue.
 
Id get the ram first, the extra clock speed you get from the higher overclock may be enough to quench your thirst, that said if your buying a 2.6-2.8Ghz quad this would benefit almost if not more in mutlithreaded software and games and then later add ram and clock further, depends what route youd want to take.

you could just do it all at once, total cost should be between £110 - £130 if you go the members market route for 4Gb of 800Mhz and a quad.
 
Last edited:
Can't see why the ram would be holding you back? A 650i chipset allows decoupling, which might cause a slight performance hit but not much. Remember though with the 650i you will need to up the Northbridge voltage a bit to get a decent fsb speed.
 
Such a long time since I played with it I've forgotten everything :p

I seem to remember thinking I'd got everything stable at 2.8 or 3.0 (including overnight Prime runs and various games), but EVE online would always crash so I gave up.
 
VFM Addict said:
Can't see why the ram would be holding you back? A 650i chipset allows decoupling, which might cause a slight performance hit but not much. Remember though with the 650i you will need to up the Northbridge voltage a bit to get a decent fsb speed.
Click to expand...

you know what i didnt even think about that, been so long since i used a nvidia chipset, only been pxx chipsets for the last 5 years
 
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