Associate
My brother in law has a cheapo pc world Celeron 2.2 Emachine he inherited from his mums work.
We've gradually upgraded it with either my upgrade spares or the odd deal from other m8's
First thing was first, get rid of the onboard graphics to play games, first problem encountered, no agp port!!!
£30 for an MSI board in the local paper, supports Prescott cpu's and is pretty good spec.
He inherited a Radeon 9550 256mb from one of my old machines upgrades.
Boosted it to 768MB ram with 3x256 PC3200 kingstone chips picked up for free from my friend who owe'd me a favour.
That two alone made a big difference to the machine, he can actually play BF2 now, although it takes a while to load and is only on medium quality.
The next plan was to look out on ebay for a P4 chip to replace the struggling Celeron, and to try and get away from the 133 bus speed. I havn't overclocked it yet since it's running kind of hot as it is at around 50degrees.
I figured he probably needs a better cooling fan or better case to help the temps. But since we're on a real tight budget and didn't want to convert it to an AMD rig......
Anyway there's quite a few P4 chips second hand on ebay, and i was just wondering, assuming they are coming from a trusted seller. What kind of money would we be looking to spend before it became just not worth it? as in better off just getting an Asrock Dual 939 board or something with onboard nvidia and a 64 3000 or something like that.
I dont' really want to have to put money into his machine for him since i've got my own upgrade plans, but he has saved £50 (he's only 13) and i was thinkin that if he could get a P4 prescott, the 1mb cache one that's 800FSB that would be a huge improvement on the celeron 2.2.
So yeah i'm asking is it worth him spending £50 on the cpu upgrade, will it make much of a difference to his gaming experience? Or should he try and get a 6600GT or something like that?
We've gradually upgraded it with either my upgrade spares or the odd deal from other m8's
First thing was first, get rid of the onboard graphics to play games, first problem encountered, no agp port!!!
£30 for an MSI board in the local paper, supports Prescott cpu's and is pretty good spec.
He inherited a Radeon 9550 256mb from one of my old machines upgrades.
Boosted it to 768MB ram with 3x256 PC3200 kingstone chips picked up for free from my friend who owe'd me a favour.
That two alone made a big difference to the machine, he can actually play BF2 now, although it takes a while to load and is only on medium quality.
The next plan was to look out on ebay for a P4 chip to replace the struggling Celeron, and to try and get away from the 133 bus speed. I havn't overclocked it yet since it's running kind of hot as it is at around 50degrees.
I figured he probably needs a better cooling fan or better case to help the temps. But since we're on a real tight budget and didn't want to convert it to an AMD rig......
Anyway there's quite a few P4 chips second hand on ebay, and i was just wondering, assuming they are coming from a trusted seller. What kind of money would we be looking to spend before it became just not worth it? as in better off just getting an Asrock Dual 939 board or something with onboard nvidia and a 64 3000 or something like that.
I dont' really want to have to put money into his machine for him since i've got my own upgrade plans, but he has saved £50 (he's only 13) and i was thinkin that if he could get a P4 prescott, the 1mb cache one that's 800FSB that would be a huge improvement on the celeron 2.2.
So yeah i'm asking is it worth him spending £50 on the cpu upgrade, will it make much of a difference to his gaming experience? Or should he try and get a 6600GT or something like that?
