Looking to Upgrade to Dual-Core on Older Dell

Brandonn

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Mar 31, 2010
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18,510
I have an older dell (Dimension 5100). Motherboard stats pulled from Belarc Advisor:

Board: Dell Inc. 0J8885
Serial Number: ..CN6986154P034D.
Bus Clock: 800 megahertz
BIOS: Dell Inc. A03 07/07/2006

It is such a pain to find information for my board. My fault for buying from a manufacturer I suppose. Anyway, browsing on NewEgg I found "Intel Celeron E3300 Wolfdale 2.5GHz 1MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor". I have a P4 3GHz, but even being a Celeron for only $50 it looks like a great way to give some new life into my rig. I don't quite have the money to build a new PC, so I have to settle with this one for a little. But will the mobo be able to use the new CPU? Any way to know before spending the money?

I was also looking at my RAM, I have 2 1Gig DDR2 533MHz sticks. I think 533MHz is the max for my mem slots, but I'm not sure. Would I see any performance increase replacing these with 800MHz?

And my last question is on 64bit, an easy upgrade, but is it worth it?

If you need any more info, just ask.

Thanks for any help.
 
Solution
http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/18133916.aspx

The motherboard uses a 945GZ chipset, which only supports up to the first generation of Core2Duo's. The Celeron E3300 will not work on. The link below is the list of CPU's that chipset will support. However, most OEM motherboard are generally BIOS locked where even one of the supported CPU's may not work.

http://ark.intel.com/chipset.aspx?familyID=22687

Now, since that has been verified, what are you doing with the system overall? Also, what is your budget? You might be able to rebuild a better system.

runswindows95

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http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/18133916.aspx

The motherboard uses a 945GZ chipset, which only supports up to the first generation of Core2Duo's. The Celeron E3300 will not work on. The link below is the list of CPU's that chipset will support. However, most OEM motherboard are generally BIOS locked where even one of the supported CPU's may not work.

http://ark.intel.com/chipset.aspx?familyID=22687

Now, since that has been verified, what are you doing with the system overall? Also, what is your budget? You might be able to rebuild a better system.
 
Solution

Brandonn

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Mar 31, 2010
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18,510
I use this as Mid-Range gaming//general usage. I'd play the high-end games if I could. :) It's very decent, but with all the new tech out there, I'm a little jealous. I don't want to invest anymore into this box, I plan on trying to build a new system in the $500-$600 range in the future. I figure I can get some older stuff, that would still be leaps ahead of what I currently have, but at some decent prices.

This machine even has trouble with HD video. I think it's just it's age. It's only 5 years or so, but how old is that in computer years.

Do you think I'd see any improvement with a 64-bit OS? My only concern would be I read some 32 bit stuff runs slower on 64 bit systems. But I think by now, all the stuff I use has a 64 bit version.