Welcome to the forums, newcomer!
Sadly you can't get much of an upgrade on that platform, even you were able to drop in a higher spec'd processor that your motherboard support. In fact any sort of an upgrade on the current platform would cost as much as buying an entry level concurrent spec'd platform, if not the same.
Can you please parse the make and model of your PSU and the age of the unit? How much have you set aside (in your mind at least) in terms of funds for a possible upgrade? Tasks that you tax the system with?
Thank you so much..really appreciate that.Well sure, if you don't already have a SATA SSD, getting one will make your computer feel way faster for normal day-to-day office tasks and email. And you can move it to a replacement computer when you get one, which you are long overdue for.
OTOH if you are wanting to upgrade to play the latest games, or to do video editing or other demanding task, then it's hopeless and no upgrade will be worth it. It's 15 years old and ready to get a learner's permit.
Is that actual "Photoshop", from Adobe? If so, which version?Usage for PC: Beginner for Phoshop, Video Conferencing with school teachers
Note the G31 chipset cannot actually support all of the 4GB you have now--0.6 to 0.75GB of which is "hardware reserved" and therefore unusable. That alone would make Photoshop pretty unpleasant. The paltry 2MB of L2 cache on the E5400 also makes it a slug.
Q6700 is about $13 and Q6600 $8, either of which would be nicer to use than a modern 6 watt Pentium for only 95 watts. While that would require at least DDR2-533, it is very unlikely that your RAM is DDR2-400 as they are 2GB sticks
I should point out that 4GB DDR2 sticks have also always been ridiculously expensive and still are, especially if you cannot use them. While in XP and Win 7 I was able to create a Ramdisk (I used Gavotte) using the otherwise untouchable memory above ~3.25GB on G31 and even put the swapfile on it to sort of still use it as RAM, I never did find one that worked in Windows 10.
For $99 you can normally find a used Dell Optiplex with 8GB and i5 3500 or soI have a lot of systems of this era. Your motherboard is a solid one and even supports overclocking which is nice.
Your current cpu was one of the better ones for that platform, so only certain upgrades are really going to help and unfortunately the one that improves everything--the q9650--still commands a high price. Otherwise, you basically have to choose between speed and more cores. Depending on what you are doing and how much the application can utilize either will determine what would be best. Keep in mind that the OS makes a difference too, and modern ones will cores so you'll need more cores just to have the same performance on an older OS that's lighter (xp or win7).
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compar...-Core2-Quad-Q9400/1099vs1106vs957vs1039vs1045
Next is ram, which unfortunately is out of your budget. But it's out of almost everyone's budget as finding 4GB DDR2 is very, very hard. And getting it to work reliably can be even harder.
As far as storage, an ssd will help more with 4GB of ram and a modern OS than say xp on the same setup. This is because of the lighter memory requirements by the OS itself.
Upgrading the gpu to something faster like a gtx770 would help too, but unfortunately gpu prices are also ridiculous right now.
If you really need an upgrade, I would look for an off-lease used system in the same price range as your upgrades--one of these will be many generations newer and even with integrated video should be much much faster than your current system and easily upgrade to 16GB of ram, which will be like night and day with a modern bloaty OS.
I have a lot of systems of this era. Your motherboard is a solid one and even supports overclocking which is nice.
Your current cpu was one of the better ones for that platform, so only certain upgrades are really going to help and unfortunately the one that improves everything--the q9650--still commands a high price. Otherwise, you basically have to choose between speed and more cores. Depending on what you are doing and how much the application can utilize either will determine what would be best. Keep in mind that the OS makes a difference too, and modern ones will cores so you'll need more cores just to have the same performance on an older OS that's lighter (xp or win7).
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compar...-Core2-Quad-Q9400/1099vs1106vs957vs1039vs1045
Next is ram, which unfortunately is out of your budget. But it's out of almost everyone's budget as finding 4GB DDR2 is very, very hard. And getting it to work reliably can be even harder.
As far as storage, an ssd will help more with 4GB of ram and a modern OS than say xp on the same setup. This is because of the lighter memory requirements by the OS itself.
Upgrading the gpu to something faster like a gtx770 would help too, but unfortunately gpu prices are also ridiculous right now.
If you really need an upgrade, I would look for an off-lease used system in the same price range as your upgrades--one of these will be many generations newer and even with integrated video should be much much faster than your current system and easily upgrade to 16GB of ram, which will be like night and day with a modern bloaty OS.
You're welcome. It's kind of hard to tell from MSI's site, but it seems like q9650 support was there from day one, so I don't think you would need to update the bios. There are newer versions though and I would download those and save them as they may not be available when you need them as manufacturers remove support for older items (why I don't know as the space or bandwidth costs practically nothing for older stuff).Thanks for your advise SamirD really appreciate that!
Btw, if I were to instal Q9650, do I need to update my current bios which is V4.5 (A7529IMS)?
Recently, I had bought 4GB x 2 sticks of RAM from online China, no brand which cost me around US20, but sad to says it does not works after installation. My PC does not load to Windows after I pressed Start button.
Thank you SamirD