upgrade adivice for a celeron m 420

[BigJim]

Have a machine with a Celeron M 420 1.6 cpu would like to know what I could
upgrade to. It is in a Lenovo Desktop J200.

tia

 

[Nate Edel]

Have a machine with a Celeron M 420 1.6 cpu would like to know what I could
upgrade to. It is in a Lenovo Desktop J200.

There are two "Celeron 420" chips: the one you said, the Celeron M 420 is a
533FSB Pentium-M ("Dothan") derivative, so basically your upgrade options
would be likely to be just the single-core Pentium M chips of that
generation... which are hard to find.

There is also a "Celeron 420" (no M) which is much newer and somewhat
faster; it's an 800FSB single core version of a Core 2 Duo ("Conroe" or in
this case, "Conroe-L".)

A quick googling is inconclusive - newegg indicates it's the Celeron M (see
969084U) but that makes little sense in a desktop, and most other sites seem
to indicate that the J200 is also available with other modern low-end
processors (ie the Pentium Dual Core E2xxx chips) which would indicate the
newer Celeron.

If it's the newer Celeron, then pretty much any of the 65nm Socket 775
800fsb chips will work, and the odds are pretty good that the 1066fsb ones
will as well.

 

[BigJim]

I can tell you this, for a celeron it runs pretty good. I installed Vista
Ult and with 2 gigs of ram it runs aero fine.
It also has the intel 950 graphics chipset. The only thing that has me
scratching my head is that the cpu is
a 478 and not the 775. I guess I am going to take the cpu out and look for
my self.
Thanks for the info.

 

[BigJim]

the head scratching is over the processor is a Intel Celeron 420 1.6
Conroe-L LGA 775. So now that that is over what would be
a modest upgrade to the chip. The MB is a 945 g/g7 chipset.

tia

 

[Nate Edel]

the head scratching is over the processor is a Intel Celeron 420 1.6
Conroe-L LGA 775. So now that that is over what would be
a modest upgrade to the chip. The MB is a 945 g/g7 chipset.

There are the new Celeron Dual-Core Processors (ie the E1200) but two cores
sharing an equally small cache on a narrow FSB may not be much improvement
on the current Celeron.

I'd recommend going at a minimum up to the Pentium Dual Core E2180 or E2200
(2.0ghz or 2.2ghz, 1mb cache, $80/$85 on NewEgg)... or if your budget
stretches that far, consider the Core 2 Duo E4500 or E4600 (2.2 or 2.4ghz,
2mb cache , $125/139 on NewEgg).

Those are all 800FSB and based on the Allendale core so they're as likely to
be compatible as anything you're likely to get and still a bunch cheaper
than the E6300 (only 1.86ghz, but 1066fsb.) The big thing you give up vs.
the E6xxx chips is virtualization.

Friends have built a couple of systems with the E2160s and E2180s and they
are actually pretty fast chips, even with the small cache.

The newer 1333FSB chips are unlikely to work, which is a shame as the E6550
and E6750 are sort of in the sweet spot for midrange machines.