Saturday, April 03, 2010

Upgrading the Pentium 4

Well, here at whatever organization this is, we run on a slim technology budget. To be more forthcoming, we get $0 plus whatever spare equipment we can dumpster-dive for.

So I decided to see how far I can upgrade my desktop. It's my newest machine and it's still too old to be useful. It's an HP dc5000 SFF, and it has an Intel Pentium 4-HTT Processor @ 2.8GHz. This rig is old, so it has a Socket 478 processor.

For what Google tells me, I can try to get a slightly faster Pentium 4. Like that's going to boost my PassMark scores much. But wait, what's this?

A Core 2 Duo that will run in my machine?


I don't know what to make of this, but according to the product listing, and the photography, this appears to be a Core 2 Duo that I can drop in a Socket 478 motherboard, although it costs almost the price of a good low-range PC.

But at the same time, then my desktop would perform about as well as a good low-range PC. Except the graphics, of course, there's no real fix for the onboard Intel 865 chipset. There's only PCI slots, and my PCI GeForce 2 MX 400 isn't going to help.

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