cpu upgrade question?

[masondoggp]

i have terrible ocd and adhd, so i want to know if what i'm buying is right for my motherboard. i have an ASUS PTGD1-LA motherboard. i currently have a pentium 4 530 3.0 ghz proccessor and i want to upgrade to pentium 4 660 3.6 ghz proccessor. is it worth it? they are very cheap right now, about 7 dollars. and i want to know if its fit for my board. also, will it make a difference?

[mammo1789]

Well it is "worth" it, has more cache 2mb-1mb and more speed 3,6 vs 3 and it is 64 bit vs 32 bit.But they have only one core and use HT.
My advice is to go with some pentium D processor with that speed ( they are dual core) if your motherboard supports it ( i think it should ) but you should update bios for the motherboard from the Asus web site.

[maonstad]

The motherboard doesn't support dual core processors. Only pentium 4's up to 3.6 ghz.

[themaster1]

i used to have one pentium 4 prescott 3ghz with HT until recently . It's still ok for websurf, light work and such coupled with a decent gfx.It could run win x64
Pentium D are dual cores but they run really hot > 95 tdp i wouldn't advise them( better cooling needed..more noise...)

[Hoser Rob]

The MB doesn't support anything but single core (I checked too). The performance difference between those 2 chips may ne measureable but I don't see how you'd ever notice any difference.

Save your 7 bucks and start saving for a new MB.

[hello_hello]

I can't imagine upgrading the 3gig CPU to a 3.6gig model would offer any performance improvement you'd really notice. Not for everyday stuff like surfing, checking email, word processing etc.

I still have fond memories of upgrading a Pentium 3 to a Pentium 4, including replacing the MB, and being disappointed at the amount of performance improvement there wasn't. I think at the time I was building a PC for a young relative, so I had another motivation for replacing my MB/CPU.... I could put the old MB and CPU to good use.

Pretty much any current CPU would easily outperform a P4. I'd wait till I could upgrade the MB and buy a new(er) CPU.

[yoda313]

I'd check online auction sites for whole desktops.

I got a dell quad core core2duo (edit sorry its a core2quad quad core) q6600 for 50.00 on an auction site during the summer of 2013.

Granted it had no operating system and no harddrive that i remember. (it was literally just the tower unit nothing else)

But it was a drastic improvement from my old amd dual core that I had.

I'd scan the auction sites for desktops. If you don't need a monitor you should be able to find a good deal.

Just read carefully to make sure they come with a harddrive and an operating system if you don't have them readily available.

[hello_hello]

If the computer's only got a small amount of RAM and the hard drive spends a lot of time thrashing around while you wait for things to happen, adding more RAM will probably improve things a lot more than a CPU upgrade. Whether RAM for that PC would be easy to find and whether it'd be cheap enough to make it worth the effort, I've no idea.