Upgrading CPU?

[jkdiver]

Hello, I have two questions... (well, sort of four)

1)
I have a Gigabyte GA-8iex 845E mobo with a Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz 533MHz/400MHz FSB ... Socket 478 cpu. Can I upgrade to a P4 HT 3.0 GHz or greater. Socket 478 with 800MHz FSB??
or
Do I have to stay with in the confines of 533MHz??

2)
Also... Is there a significant differnce between running a regular P4, 2.4GHz and running a P4, 3.0 (or greater) with Hyper-Threading technology?... Is it worth the expense to upgrade?

Thanks very much.

 

[endyen]

Your board is not rated to run the 800mhz fsb chips.
The only HT enabled chip you could run would be the P4b 3.06ghz chip.
They are hard to find, and tend to be overpriced.
You could get lucky on ebay.

 

[jkdiver]

Thanks very much for your reply.

Do you think the upgrade is worth the effort and/or price?

 

[dhlucke]

No

 

[ltcommander_data]

http://www23.tomshardware.com/index.html?modelx=33&model1=26&model2=22&chart=17

You can take a look here. Most people feel that Tom's Hardware skews things in favour of Intel chips when comparing to AMD, but since we are comparing Intel to Intel the relations should be valid.

Take a look at the 2 chips coloured in red. The one faster one is the 3.06GHz 533MHz FSB Northwood running on the i850E chipset. The slower one is the 2.4GHz 533MHz FSB Northwood also running on the i850E. When you look at the results don't look at the actual performance numbers but look at them in comparison to each other. You can flip through the benchmarks to see how they perform on different applications. You can decide for yourself whether the performance difference is worth it.

If you feel good about it you might try to overclock your current Northwood. Adding more RAM, or a new graphics card can also be beneficial. If your hard drives are more than 2 years old you should really consider adding new ones. HDDs are the slowest device on a system so they are the bottleneck. Newer hard drives have more cache and higher sustained transfer rates so upgrading hard drives can make your whole system feel faster.

Note: There are 2 other 2.4GHz Northwoods and 1 other 3.06GHz Northwoods on the charts, but they aren't useful for a comparison. 1 of the Northwoods run on a 400MHz FSB and the other runs on a 800MHz FSB. The other 3.06GHz Northwood uses a different motherboard so the results aren't comparable. Just use the 2 CPUs I already highlighted in red.