jasper said:
Hi
I want to upgrade my old system and am thinking a new CPU, more Ram and a
new graphics card. But the shops keep pushing a new box onto me, which I
don't want. I just want to give the old darling a boost untill I have some
more $$ to build a new system. I know whats inside but I want to find out
what I can upgrade to on the CPU. Hope someone can help.
I have
a HP Pavillion 8960
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...=en&lc=en&product=67217&os=209&lang=en&cc=us&
AMD Athlon Tunderbird 1.3GHz CPU, Socket A???
With something that old, you will have to buy second hand. The computer
shops no longer stock CPUs that the board can handle. However, I can't
find information about the motherboard brand and model that's in your
computer, so I really can't say if it even can be upgraded. You may have
to carefully open the case and report back on the manufacturer and model
of the motherboard (printed on the board). I can find that it's a VIA
KM133 chipset. According to:
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/chipsets/legacy/km133/
it can take CPUs with 200MHz FSBs. I think that ended with the Athlon
1.4, as all the Athlon XPs were 266MHz (starting at the 1500+).
2 x 128MB 133MHz SDRAM (upgradable to 2 x 512MB) sockets are 168pin DIMMs
Well you've answered your own question there. Are you using windowsXP?
If so, I'd recommend 512mb of RAM as a good starting point. If you're
doing heavy graphics or video editting, you may like to have 1GB.
However, I seem to recall PC133 being disproportionately expensive
compared to modern DDR memory.
40 & 80 GB harddrive (80's brand new)
AGP 4x Graphics Card, nVidia TNT2 M64, 32MB SRAM (not upgradable)
Is it onboard or is this what's in your AGP slot? If it's a 4x AGP slot
you should be able to put in any of the modern generation of 4x/8x
cards. I wouldn't bother with anything too fancy, though, as you won't
see the improvement with that system. However, an ATi 9200 type card
with 128mb of memory is quite cheap and should suit fine for an upgrade.
What do you need the video upgrade for, specificially?
3 PCI slots, 2 free
1 AGP slot
Thanks
New computers can be had fairly inexpensively from both local shops and
the big international companies. I agree with the salespeople: given the
expense of the memory upgrade and the ambiguity of whether or not you
can even upgrade your CPU (and you'd have to buy a second hand CPU off
ebay or similar), you might as well get a new system.
Cheers,
Ari
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