Upgrading my mum's ancient Acer X3960 PC on the cheap - will a xeon work here?

[Jimmy Weirdarms]

My mum has an Acer x3960. It's an SFF box rocking a Sandy Bridge core i3 processor, 1 5400rpm hard drive and 4GB of DDR3. It's on an H67 Express chipset, the motherboard appears to be an acer H67H2-AD.

This weekend she asked me to look at something, the scanner wasn't connecting properly, but it took so long to do anything at all that I went out and bought an SSD for it and moved the system over to that. Much, much more responsive now.

There are a couple of spare RAM slots so I've just ordered a pair of 2GB DDR3 DIMMs from the auction site for £5 because why not?

The processor is still weak, so I was wondering about a budget upgrade. For £20 I can grab an i5-2500, going from 2(4) to 4(4). For £35 I can get a Xeon E3-1245, which would take it to 4(8). Going to a 'real' i7 is probably a minimum of £50 and I honestly don't want to spend the extra on the old PoS. But I could stretch to £35.

I've used E3 chips in desktop machines before just fine, but I wonder if the crappy little board this thing is based on will have a problem with it. There seems to be about 80W headroom on the tiny PSU so the extra power requirements should be ok.

Anyone tried upgrading one of these? Worth attempting the Xeon? Have there been sandy bridge boards where the xeon desktop chips haven't worked?

(--edit-- or should I just not bother at all? I mean, maybe the i3 is fine for the browsing and photo-collecting she does on there, it's not like she and her husband are gamers...)

 

[Jimmy Weirdarms]

I'd leave it on the i3, the SSD will have made the biggest user perceptible difference.

My Dad was moaning about his E6700 based machine, mainly that it took a long time to boot up and open applications. Tossed a £30 SSD in it a year ago to see how it went, he's perfectly happy with it now.

You might be right. And yeah, the SSD is what makes the killer difference there. I can't even use a non-SSD machine these days, it's painful. I'll shove the RAM in because I've bought it now... probably leave it at that.

 

[Jimmy Weirdarms]

The heatsink looked pretty decent TBH, I think it can cope with a bit more. Currently torn between the £20 i5-2400 and the £15 xeon e3-1225, which is basically the same chip though the xeon is a gamble as it might not work

(I know, it's only a fiver, but I'm purposely being as cheap as possible here)

(edit - bought the xeon for £15, will take an hour out during Xmas celebrations next month to upgrade it)

 

[Jimmy Weirdarms]

Upgrade complete!

They're unlikely to notice much difference from 4GB -> 8GB, or from 2 core i3 -> 4 core xeon, but it makes me happier

And with the SSD it's actually usable. Mum says she can get into AOL in only a few seconds now.... *groan*