Want to upgrade my cpu,motherboard, and ram ?

Question

I am looking to upgrade my pc and was in need of help of what to do. It is currently a Pentium 4 on windows xp and i am looking to jump up to a amd phenom quad core cpu and a min of 2gig ram. I will be keeping my graphics card and buying a new sound card also keeping every thing else ie hdd,dvd drive,power supply etc what my main concern is is with my windows xp as it was preloaded and didn't have no disc with it and as i would need to reformat my hdd how can i get windows xp back up and running again

here is a link to what i would be purchasing

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/AMD-PHENOM-QUAD-CORE-2GB-RAM-MOTHERBOARD-9550_W0QQitemZ140236661296QQihZ004QQcategoryZ131514QQtcZphotoQQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp1742.m153.l1262

Answer 1

The most important thing for games is Mhs...only a few games use two cores and none use quad. Check to see if your mobo will take an E8400...if so, it will rock and you don't have to buy the other stuff...well maybe the ram...

Answer 2

i would suggest u to keep the hard drive only if its a SATA drive or else its better u upgrade the hard drive too if its IDE Drive another thing is if u put the old hard drive in new system ur xp will never boot due to hardware changes.

2nd thing i will tell u is quad core supported mother board comes with PCI express slot i am not sure wether ur graphic card support that slot... it should be an AGP card i think.

so i would suggest you to upgrade the whole pc except the monitor... in short if u upgrade u will get a SATA hard drive.. an PCI express slot...and about 400W of power supply, enough to handle all ur peripherals inside the cabinet. and i forgot you  will get the buy back amount for ur old pc too.... so go for it

Answer 3

Remember reading somewhere you can patch the registry sometimes so your previous copy will adapt to the hardware changes; custom pc or pc format magazine I think?

Answer 4

hi sarah

          upgrading your motherboard is probally the most demanding of all upgrades,it can sometimes mean changing your processor memory and even hard drive,so you need to do some serious research on compatible upgrades

          since you are currently using a pentium 4 which uses the socket 478 or socket lga775 motherboard this means you will need to simply ditch this board,the amd phenom uses the am2+ socket motherboard and supports ddr2/3 memory(dependable on model)

          so lets look for some decent priced upgrades,and for your processor why not consider the AMD Phenom Quad 9950 2.6GHz (Retail AM2+) (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Component...

          this is a excellent processor and amazingly fast,with a 2.6ghz clock speed and a L2=512KB Cache Memory this has loads going for it

            however a decent processor is no good without a decent motherboard and the MSI K9A2 PLATINUM 790FX (AM2+) (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Component...

is a worthwhile contender

       it has 2 x pci-express x16 slots and a extra 2 pci-e slots for quad vga support,and depending on the way you set this up you could have quite a performer

       it supports ddr2 memory(533/667/800/1066)and will support a maximum of 8gb ram,and with 6 sata ports theres plenty of storage options including support for RAID 0/1/0+1

         for its price the MSI K9A2 PLATINUM 790FX is a excellent bargain,and combind with the phenom cpu you will have a excellent base for any p.c

          as for your windows os you will have to reinstall windows again,even if you could transfer the current windows it would require you to re-activate it as you have mad a significant upgrade(motherboard) and under these circumstances windows needs to be re-activated

         so along with the processor and the motherboard you will also need a copy of windows xp(or vista) and a compatible psu,and the stated 400watt psu should be fine

          however isnt there a way you can upgrade the existing pc and for example buy decent graphic card and add some more memory

         i mean as a gaming p.c i currently use a pentium 4 3.2ghz,2gb ddr ram and a geforce 7600gt,and apart from a few games i manage decent frame rates at medium settings

         check out to see if you could enhance your current set up by adding a new and faster graphic card and another gig of memory,i mean theres some extremely fast agp card such as the ATI Radeon X1950 PRO 512MB AGP and Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 3850 512MB AGP,its worth checking out

          any problems let me know

                     good luck sarah   !

Answer 5

Why reformat you hard drive?

Anyway, forget that kit, it's pretty useless whatever you want to do. First of all, multithreaded software is hardly even here yet, and even when it does, that's the worst of the quad-core bunch. Try this, and if your hard drive is under 250GB, just install it as a secondary drive and buy another one. They're very cheap. get Vista too.

CPU:http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Othe...

Motherboard:http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Component...

RAM:http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Othe...

Graphics Card:http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Component...

Sound Card:http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Component...

Hard Drive:http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Othe...

Vista:http://www.pcaccessories.org/Microsoft-W...

Some of it may seem a bit expensive, but it'll last you for years and years to come, and the motherboard will allow you to carry on upgrading due to its PCI-E 2.0 support and high-speed RAM support. Plus, the Vista disc is retail so you can carry on using it for multiple hard disks and PCs.