I have a Shuttle XPC. Nice bit of kit, but the motherboard is a bit long in the tooth now and can only support 2Gb of RAM. Vista copes OK with Aero off, but it’s not ideal. The 478 Socket has a Pentium 4 2.8Ghz in it.
It seems like I cant buy a new XPC form factor motherboard to replace it. I can, however, get another XPC barebones for around £250 that will take upto either 4Gb or 8Gb – but if I do that I think Im restricted to a 775 Socket which is compatible with “Socket 775 supports Single, Dual and Quad Core processors from Intel
with Core technology and 800, 1066 or 1333MHz front side bus:
Supports Core 2 Quad, Core 2 Duo, Pentium Dual-Core,
Celeron Dual-Core, Celeron 4xx”
Im guessing this means that I cant use my pentium 4 CPU in the 775 Socket?
In which case, what kind of chip should I be looking for? (no gaming, have 256Mb Graphics card anyway, running Vista but only Excel as a process hungry app). I cant quite work out whether I should be looking at stated “speed” in Ghz or Dual Core, Quad, Pentium, Celeron or whatever, as for some reasons some of the more expensive chips have a “slower” speed than cheaper ones? eh?
Any help gratefully received.
