Upgrade my motherboard and CPU?

[NeilC]

My PC is getting a bit old. I have a pentium 4 3.? Ghz on a Jetway PT800DBP (VIA) motherboard.

I'm thinking of upgrading to get better performance. What might be a relativley cheap upgrade to get a noticable difference in performance? My diskdrives, DVD, graphics cards, soundcards etc are all good.

Do I need to go duo core?

[nimzov]

My PC is getting a bit old. I have a pentium 4 3.? Ghz on a Jetway PT800DBP (VIA) motherboard.

I'm thinking of upgrading to get better performance. What might be a relativley cheap upgrade to get a noticable difference in performance? My diskdrives, DVD, graphics cards, soundcards etc are all good.

Do I need to go duo core?
I will ne watching this thread as I am asking myself the same question.

In my case I do not play games nor use intense graphics but of course I like a fast machine. Now I have a P4 - 1,4GHz.

nimzo

[Wudang]

Buy more ram?

[Michael Redman]

Better performance for what? How much RAM do you have, and will your motherboard support more? I'm no expert on the matter, but I would think a 3+ GHz Pentium 4 would still be plenty of processing for most applications.

[Blank]

The cheapest upgrade to get better performance is by far adding on some memory.. Under 2 gigs just doesn't seem to be enough these days. Especially in Vista.

On a budget, you might want to check up on AMDs.. They usually give decent performance and the processors are priced a lot lower than Intels.

[kbm99]

It would be a lot easier to answer your questions if you could let us know what you use your computer for.

For non-power use (no game playing, no heavy-duty number crunching, photo editing, etc) I'd expect you can't do much to improve the overall performance that you are getting now. You can only spell-check a document so quickly, after all, and processor speed is not the bottleneck for things like that. From glancing over the specs on the board, it looks like it will not even support most modern video cards, but I am guessing that's not an issue for you. If you are a Windows XP user, upgrading your RAM (but no higher than 3gb) will probably get you the best return on investment, and I'd suggest that before a complete motherboard/processor upgrade.

If you are just experiencing the general sort of sluggish PC behavior that so many people seem to complain about, it's likely that you can do a few things to improve your system performance without spending any money at all. Thing like disabling/uninstalling unused software (search engines, google toolbar, stuff like that) and paring down the stuff that loads at startup will make a big difference in many cases.

[egslim]

First clean up spyware, virusses and other malware from your pc. Then check if DMA is working for your harddrive.

[Mongrel]

If this (http://www.jetwaycomputer.com/spec/pt800dbp.html) is your mobo then depends what you're going to be using it for.

As others have said a clean up of Windows is always going to be good.

You can up the RAM to 3 gig but won't notice too much difference over 2, unless you play a lot of games or run photo\video editing software

If you do play games then it's probably time to get thee to a computer store and get a PCI-E motherboard, AGP is dead for gamers :(

[Yalius]

Just back up your data, wipe the PC clean and reinstall Windows fresh. You'd be shocked just how the performance degrades on a Windows installation over time, even assuming there was no malware involved.

[NeilC]

Thanks guys.

I wouldn't say it's sluggish. Windows is cleanly installed. No spyware, no viruses. I have about 2 GB of RAM. Disk is a SATA digital caviar 320GB which has a ton of free space on it.

That is my motherboard in the link by the way.

I'm just looking to speed it up for video processing and cubase etc. It can be a bit jerky playing hi-def WMV files which show about 80% CPU usage.

I'm wondering if I got on the new duo core CPUs and motherboard with the faster RAM and FSB speeds etc whether it would be substantially faster or not.

[Mongrel]

Thanks guys.

I wouldn't say it's sluggish. Windows is cleanly installed. No spyware, no viruses. I have about 2 GB of RAM. Disk is a SATA digital caviar 320GB which has a ton of free space on it.

That is my motherboard in the link by the way.

I'm just looking to speed it up for video processing and cubase etc. It can be a bit jerky playing hi-def WMV files which show about 80% CPU usage.

I'm wondering if I got on the new duo core CPUs and motherboard with the faster RAM and FSB speeds etc whether it would be substantially faster or not.

That doesn't sound like a CPU bottleneck, otherwise your usage would be 100%.

It's more likely that you've got either a lot of innocent running in the background or that there's a damaged file in the graphics\sound drivers or the codecs themselves. You could try Hijackthis (http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/programs.php#hijackthis) to check the background processes, you can check the output log www.hijackthis.de or post here ;)

[PixyMisa]

Ah. If you're doing video work, then yes, a dual core CPU should give you a significant boost. I've done stuff using the Divx and Xvid codecs, and both work with dual cores. Won't do that much for video playback, though.

The problem is, to upgrade to a dual-core system, you'll have to replace not just your CPU and motherboard, but also your memory and video card, because you'll be moving from DDR to DDR2 and AGP to PCI-E.

It's a bit of a pain; I'm still on my P4 2.6 for that reason. I do have a shiny new dual-core notebook, though. :)

[negativ]

Poor video playback performance can also be caused by a damaged or badly configured codec. The system in the OP should be more than capable of handling video without any trouble.

Have you:

Reinstalled your video drivers?
Reinstalled motherboard chipset drivers? ( http://www.viaarena.com/?PageID=2 )

Tried a different media player just to rule out wonky software? (I swear by VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/))


Durrr, I just noticed that Mongrel already pretty much covered it. Oh well.

[four elevener]

If you do go ahead and upgrade, now is a good time. Both Intel and AMD implemented price cuts on their CPUs this week, and Intel has released newer versions of their Core 2 Duos with a faster 1333 MHz FSB and new clock speeds.

[PixyMisa]

Go for the quad-core! They just cut the price by 50%. :)

I just realised that my Linux box is PCI-E and can be upgraded to a dual-core Opteron, which would turn it into a great Windows box. But that would involve moving 1.3TB of data and reinstalling... everything, basically.