dell

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Steve

Hey anyone have a Dell Dimension 4550 that has tweaked there's? I am trying
to figure out what the max I can upgrade to and I have figured out that the
max for ram is 1 gb but I am a little bit fuzzy on what I can do for procs.
I presently have a P4 2.4. Dell support says that I can get a 3.06 in
there. The front side Bus is 533...
 
Steve said:
Hey anyone have a Dell Dimension 4550 that has tweaked there's? I am
trying to figure out what the max I can upgrade to and I have figured out
that the max for ram is 1 gb but I am a little bit fuzzy on what I can do
for procs. I presently have a P4 2.4. Dell support says that I can get a
3.06 in there. The front side Bus is 533...
Click to expand...

Not trying to second guess your intentions, but here are a few thoughts.

Upgrading a Dell is pushing the entire proprietary issue a bit further than
comfortable. Google something like "replace dell case" for examples of why
your power supply, motherboard, or case may have a shorter life span than
your upgrades. And you're in knee deep if one of those breaks.

Upgrading from a Pentium 4 2.4/533 will yield marginal boost. You'd be
better off looking at a FSB clock jump. Going for a 800 FSB Pentium with HT
would be a better choice. It requires a new MB. An Athlon XP system
running at least PC3200 RAM would give you a noticeable jump I think.

Upgrades have always been a dicey issue. Of the three core components
(motherboard bus, cpu, and memory) at least one changes radically enough in
a year's time to make upgrades really iffy. Upgrading to a newest
generation computer is all but impossible. Moving from a third generation
system to a second might be feasible but rarely cost effective.

But anyway, I don't think a Dell 4550 is worth upgrading beyond simply
adding more ram. 1GB is the limit. I'd order from Crucial myself.
 
Hey anyone have a Dell Dimension 4550 that has tweaked there's? I am trying
to figure out what the max I can upgrade to and I have figured out that the
max for ram is 1 gb but I am a little bit fuzzy on what I can do for procs.
I presently have a P4 2.4. Dell support says that I can get a 3.06 in
there. The front side Bus is 533...
Click to expand...
www.crucial.com and follow their product selector. It'll tell you what
RAM you can put in.
 
Thanks guys,

It's my wife's system and I was kinda thinking of just upgrading ram.
Believe me from this point forward all my systems will be custom. I was in
college and my wife and I didn't have allot of cash flow at the time...Soooo
I spent some of my college lean money and got a dell:-)
 
Thanks guys,

It's my wife's system and I was kinda thinking of just upgrading ram.
Believe me from this point forward all my systems will be custom. I was in
college and my wife and I didn't have allot of cash flow at the time...Soooo
I spent some of my college lean money and got a dell:-)
Click to expand...
Dell are OK for general use.
 
Steve,

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/dim4550/specs.htm#1101572

The machine uses an 845PE chipset, so it's limited to a 533 MHz FSB (front
side bus) as a maximum. (There are some 845PE systems that permit 800 MHz,
but I believe that Intel did not officially support that; it's a form of
overclocking. It's unlikely that would be easy to do on the Dell.)

I doubt that it supports the newer "Prescott" CPUs, even those available
with a 533 MHz FSB.

I doubt that upgrading from a 2.4 GHz CPU to a 3.06 GHz one would be
life-altering. (It's a 28% boost, at best.)

It might be worthwhile to max out the memory, particularly if you have less
than 512 MB, and you're running XP. The machine has only two DIMM slots, so
you'd get to the maximum supported RAM, 1 GB, with two 512 MB modules.
www.crucial.com isn't necessarily the cheapest source (in the US), but they
guarantee compatibility.

Look on the bright side: you could own a machine with the original 845
chipset, that used PC133 SDRAM. 1.7 GHz P4 machines with that tended to be
slower than 1 GHz PIII systems. Yecchh, as they used to write in Mad
Magazine.

HTH.

Bob Knowlden


Address may be scrambled. Replace nkbob with bobkn.
 
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