Dell XPS Gen 4 Video and RAM upgrade options

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luckyducky141488

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Jan 25, 2014
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Ok, so I know what your thinking, " Quit being a Cheapo and buy a new PC!!". Well, hear me out, I have a Dell Dimension XPS GEN 4 with the 3.46 Ghz P 4. It's running 2 Gigs Ram, 2 Raptor 75 gig HDDs in RAID, an ATI Radeon 4800 series GPU and Windows 7 Ultimate x86 (32 bit).

Now, I know It's an outdated dinosaur, but it's my outdated dinosaur. My question is, what would be the best RAM and Video card Upgrade for it that it could handle as well as HDD. Can I use SSD with it? If so, what would be the best for the most reasonable price. I'm using it as my gaming PC at the moment but I'm not trying to run BF4 or anything like that, I mostly play mmorpgs and I'm just looking to upgrade it so that it's doesn't lag out on them so much or when I'm running my minecraft server on it. Also, should I (and can I) upgrade to 64 bit windows?

And no, thanks for your opinion but I'm not just gonna spring for a new PC so don't bother saying it please. Thanks for any and all help or pertinent information guys. And I'm also not very experienced with building PCs, just getting into it, that's why I'm asking people who should know these things
 
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Where do I start first to upgrade your gpu whats your power supply unit rated and who makes it 2 the hard drives are going to be slow to begin with so a 1 terrbyte new drive would probably be faster ram do you have 2 extra slots to add 2 more gigs??? I take it there running ddr2....Amd you would more then likely have to purchase another copy of windows to upgrade to 64 bit .. but it would be best to download all your drivers from dell first for your system. Ssd drive would work if you have sata in your system 120 would speed your boot os up a lot.
 
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I believe it's using the stock 460w psu, the HDDs are the 10k rpm raptors, though i know it doesn't make a difference since i obviously need bigger ones, If i got 2 1tb drives would i still be able to run them in RAID? or would i even need to with an ssd for boot. Yes, it has 4 slots with 1 gig each capacity and currently only running 2 x 1g. and yes it has sata, I just don't know enough about it and it's hard to find info on something this outdated to decide what would be the best upgrades that would work best with this thing.
 
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Yes I belive you can run 2 x 1 TB drives in raid your upgrade path would be 2 more gigs of ram and if your pc has a pci e slot 2.0 a radeon 7750 or 7770 would be as far as I go with that Power supply unless you bought a new 500 watt .. But you go much higher on the gpu side your going to run in to bottleneck is you game..
 
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Yeah, the bottle neck thing is about all i had been able to find out about upgrading the GPU. That and the fact that its a pain in the ass to upgrade the psu in this thing for multiple reasons. Or rather finding a PSU that will fit and has the right connectors. I believe it only has the pci e 1.0 but someone was saying that the 2.0 might be backwards compatible with the 1.0 slot
 
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I don't think any of the cards that 2.0 are going to work for you a 3.0 card will work with a 2.0 slot yes but a 3.0 card I don't think is going to work with a 1.0 slot..


3.0 cards in 2.0+ slot will work at 2.0+. 2.0 cards in older 1.0+ would work at 1.0+ . Simply, all of them are backward compatible. You could run it on PCI-e 1.0 x8; it would be bottlenecked but it would work. But at your case, I guess any single 3.0 graphics card could work normally on a Mobo with with PCIe 2.0 smoothly.
 
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Ok, so I just found a thread that was from Nov. last year and they were telling him that it doesn't even have PCI e just has PCI so, I'm guessing as they told him, im SOL on the GPU upgrade and im just going to have to settle for RAM and HDD for now since it runs the graphics just fine, just lags in games if i have 2 windows open and sometimes a little when i only have 1 open. I'm guessing thats to do with ram, am i correct? I don't know exactly how much ram the ATI 4800 itself is supposed to have but when i open the properties tab on it it says it says this

Total Available Graphics Memory: 1791 MB
Dedicated Video Memory: 1024 MB
System Video Memory 0 MB
Shared System Memory 767 MB

Does that mean that 1 of my 2 gigs of ram is also dedicated to the GPU and if so Is that why its slowing me down?
 
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But which one of these cards do you own because these have more stream processing units then the 6670 card does....

ATI Radeon™ HD 4870, ATI Radeon™ HD 4850 and ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 GPUs bring the power of graphics ‘supercomputing’ to gamers, setting a new standard for visual computing. Redefine the way you play and take HD gaming to the extreme with best-in-class performance. With up to 1.2 teraFLOPS on tap, the TeraScale graphics engine delivers an immersive, cinematic gaming experience. Add this graphics card to your PC and watch Blu-ray movies and play HD content with incredible visual fidelity1,2 or take your experience to another level with new multimedia capabilities. Do it all with break-through efficiency that doesn’t compromise performance.
 
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i honestly couldn't tell you as it's the pc im on right now lol, ill open it up tomorrow and take a look. I really appreciate the help and the prompt responses and I will get back to you with more info tomorrow night. Im going to just build a new one before the year is out hopefully but the problem with that is i could put it together, if i could put together a good list of compatible parts, but i wouldn't know how to set it up software wise or anything like that lol, so i really will need a COMPLETE comprehensive step by step tutorial at a later date, but i'll cross that bridge when i come to it and maybe ill have learned a little something by then. again, thanks for the help
 
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Ok, so I got the GPU-Z program and I have run it and determined that it is at least a 4850 based on the number of shaders, now the problem with that is that it says Card reports that it supports PCIE 1.1x16 and that is what it is running at, even with render test, now according to their website, all the hd 4800 series are PCIE 2.0, wtf lol
 
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