Upgrade Vs Replace?
Dear Fred, A few years back, "single chip upgrades" seemed to be all the rage. Replacing the main processor chip on the motherboard was touted (along with more RAM and maybe a video card upgrade) as a way of breathing new life into a tired old system. Today I virtually never see a processor upgrade mentioned. Are they still done?
My home system is a four-year old 1.1 GHz Athlon, used mostly for gaming. Of late, it's been pretty puny, especially for online games. Would a new CPU and video card let me squeeze a few years out of the old machine, or am I doomed to low end games until I can afford a new system? ---Randy Woodward
It's a matter of what the increments are, Randy. When PCs were slower, incremental upgrades made a lot of sense and offered a lot of bang for the buck. For example, let's set the Wayback machine way, *way* back: One of the biggest kicks I've ever gotten from hardware was upgrading from a 4.77MHz processor to a model with a "turbo" switch that boosted the CPU to 10MHz. Wow--- everything was more than twice as fast!
The "turbo" switch just doubled the clock speed; the rest of the hardware had enough "slop" in it to accommodate the speed change without trouble. After all, the absolute speeds just weren't that great to begin with. By analogy: A car rolling along at 2mph (or kph) can also roll at 4 with hardly any extra stress.
But it's different with today's PCs. In your case, you could theoretically triple your PC's speed. But you'd be talking about a large absolute difference. To use the same analogy: Your car probably easily can go 100 MPH (160kph) on the right road, if you let it, but there's no way in hell you can drive at triple that speed. <g> The car's just not built for it.
So it is with your PC: For large speed gains at the higher end of the spectrum, you'll run into issues of RAM timing, CPU timing, heat generation, and more. By the time you make all the necessary changes to accommodate the faster CPU, you'll probably have been better off just getting a new PC designed for the high speeds to begin with. For that matter, given today's aggressive pricing, it'll probably be cheaper just to buy a new unit, too.
Example: You can get a brand-new system with half a gig of RAM, a 100GB hard drive, and an AMD 3200+ CPU for about $250 from places like TigerDirect, and others. I don't think you could even come close to that price by totally upgrading an older system.
Believe me, I'd never callously suggest tossing aside perfectly good hardware just for the sake of an arbitrary upgrade. But there are times when it really is more sensible and efficient to buy new; and I suspect this is one of them.
BTW, see #9, below, for an idea of how you might put that old PC to good use.
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