Putting my video together last night really highlighted the age & limitations of my PC. It’s a 5 year old 2.7GHz Athlon 64 using an AM2 socket.

I’ve been looking today at upgrading the CPU and it appears the options for AM2 compatible chips are few and far between as the technology is superceded. So I have two questions

a) Would a dual core processor be noticeably better than my existing one, as the Athlon X2 seems to the best/ only upgrade for my motherboard

or…

b) Should I just swap the entire motherboard out to a more recent and more expensive option

The computer really only gets used for internet stuff but i envisage doing more video stuff to get the best out of my camera. I don’t want to go down the route of a totally new computer as I’ve got a couple of internal 1TB hardrives in my existing one and transferring all the music, films and pictures to a new one is a hassle I can do without.

You’d be better off upgrading everything, but a new CPU will mean new memory and possibly a new graphics card as well ( depending on what connector your current one has ).

I’ve not looked to do this in the UK for a long time, but seem to remember that some companies did upgrade packages aimed at this sort of thing to take the hassle out of choosing the right components/making sure that they were all compatible.

Alternatively you could put an X2 AMD chip in there ( I did this for a previous machine ), but you will only get a modest increase in performance.

Is that AMD Athlon XP 2700+ rather that 2.7GHz processor? I don’t know of a 2.7GHz one but 2700+ doens’t sound right. I have changed CPUs on PCs a few times by buying on Ebay; cheap so depends how much improvement you need.

BTW, check out http://www.cpubenchmark.net/ for comparisons of CPU performance

Moving the data drives into a new PC (assuming it has space) would be a lot easier and give you a better performance increase.. plus a ‘free’ copy of Windows 7.

I think if you want cheap n easy I’d go for the x2 (find the right one then check out EBay too) and extra RAM.

Depending on your motherboard, you may be able to update the bios to support an AM3 quad-core.

I’ve recently upgraded a very similar set up to an Athlon 620 x4, just to help me through another couple of years gaming until I can afford a new machine.

If you’ve got a bit more of a budget than I had, take a look at the AMD Phenoms…

Yeah I’d agree with Mudshark – not actually running at 2.7Ghz, it’s probably closer 2Ghz – it’s some sort of confusing ‘equivalent speed rating’ AMD used a few years back – I had an XP 2000+ that ran at 1.6Ghz I think.

My 2200 x2 ran at 2.1Ghz, the XP2400+ before it ran at 1.8Ghz 😕

Hmmm. It’s all very confusing. I think I’ve got my current processor wrong, I think it’s actually an Athlon 3500+.

One concern about buying a new PC and installing the drives is invalidating the warranty straight away. I know my current PC had a seal on the case that invalidated the warranty if it was broken.

My old dual core motherboard couldn’t provide the necessary voltages to run a quad core, it can be pretty tricky.

I made my system last as long as possible (a bit like Trigger’s brush, probably one system in 10+ years and lots of upgrades until nothing of the original remained) but finally went the whole hog and upgraded from a dual core Pentium-D with AGP graphics card and 2Gb ram to a quad core i5 with 4Gb just before Christmas and the difference is amazing.

There’s only so far you can push a given system so if you can afford it I’d say that a new base unit with Windows 7 would be the way to go and then upgrade that as and when in the years to come until you need a new unit again. You can get some suprising cheap quad core systems these days but there are also so good deals on cpu/motherboard/memory packages but then you’d need to add in a gfx card, operating system and possibly a new psu.

If you get offered 32bit or 64bit Windows go for 64bit, I made the mistake of going 32bit without realising that there was a 4Gb memory limit for 32bit Windows!