upgrading old pc

lampybc2

Distinguished
Mar 22, 2011
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18,780
Hi all;

so I was recently given an OLD "Intel(R) Pentium(R) D 3.40GHz" I have turned it into a media server with windows 10 but its SLOW AS HELL hoping to upgrade it and need some help with compatibility.

CPU - Intel Core2 Quad Q9650 -
RAM - need some help here seems to be very hard to find ram for this, looking for if possible 2x4GB
and put O/S on a small SSD - Samsung 650 EVO 120GB SSD

will this work and is there anything better out there?
 
Solution
With that motherboard you cant do much and show up here again after few months or year which is not good. We want you to get what will run for a long period without requiring any upgrade.
It is in your budget why not go for it no reason to save by going for old stuff where as you are getting new lineup.
Here are the parts

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor ($194.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: Asus H110M-A Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($51.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory ($53.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V300 Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($41.33 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 960 2GB SuperSC ACX 2.0+ Video Card ($163.98 @ Newegg)
Total: $506.27
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-05-26 03:05 EDT-0400
 
its a standard dell computer with a dell case

mobo
Board: Dell Inc. 0RF703
Serial Number: ..CN1374071D021X.
Bus Clock: 800 megahertz
BIOS: Dell Inc. 2.1.0 12/04/2006
processor
3.40 gigahertz Intel Pentium D
16 kilobyte primary memory cache
2048 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (2 total)
Not hyper-threaded
memory
1014 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory
Slot 'DIMM_1' has 512 MB (serial number 020415E2)
Slot 'DIMM_3' is Empty
Slot 'DIMM_2' has 512 MB (serial number 020415D3)
Slot 'DIMM_4' is Empty

 
If you don't want GPU

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($297.89 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: Asus H110M-A Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($51.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: G.Skill Aegis 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-2400 Memory ($109.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Kingston SSDNow V300 Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($41.33 @ OutletPC)
Total: $501.19
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-05-26 03:23 EDT-0400
 



seems a little excessive for a media server was thinking upgrade ram cpu and go to SSD and that would be plenty
 
With that motherboard you cant do much and show up here again after few months or year which is not good. We want you to get what will run for a long period without requiring any upgrade.
It is in your budget why not go for it no reason to save by going for old stuff where as you are getting new lineup.
 
Solution
ok cool thanks i may aswell pretty much start over again, am building a new house at the moment and was kind of hoping to eventually put this computer out of the way and into my rack anyway, ive done a lot of PC builds but never one that is rack installed is there anything I need to know for this?