CPU Upgrade

Author
Discussion

Winky151

Original Poster:

1,267 posts

140 months

Friday 23rd September 2016
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I'm sure I'm one of the many who use a PC everyday but haven't got a clue about them (got techies at work to fix things). My home PC use is emails, a bit of surfing, the odd excel document & holiday/car show pics (NO gaming at all). Its probably about 10 years old but fine for what I need except currently getting a lot of CPU usage (svchost which I kill the odd thing) but I want to upgrade the CPU anyway. The current one is an Intel e4500. What can I get that will be faster & a straight swap?

TIA

Brother D

3,698 posts

175 months

Friday 23rd September 2016
quotequote all
You need to check what your motherboard/bios will support, and secondly if the machine is that old, how much memory does it have? - adding memory frequently gives noticeable changes as does using an SSD - tbh, if you don't want to spend any money, then a clean wipe and re-install will probably do wonders over upgrading the CPU. Lastly maybe think about getting something a bit more modern. There are some bargain base units on ebay that can be had for not a lot of money.

Thorburn

2,398 posts

192 months

Friday 23rd September 2016
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As above really - further information needed.

The chip is one of the 1st generation Core 2 Duo chips, so absolute BEST case scenario you might be able to go to one of the later 45nm 2nd generation Core 2 Quad chips. Assuming no silly things like power limitations on the board an original B3 stepping Core 2 Quad Q6600 or Core 2 Extreme QX6700 should be compatible with the current BIOS (as they pre-date the E4500).

Most Q6600's are the later G0 stepping as those co-incided with a big price drop and may require a BIOS update, but all QX6700's are B3 as they introduced the Q6700 and QX6800 when they went to G0 stepping chips. Downside of the QX6700 is they go for more money on eBay (£30-40 as opposed to about £15) and use more power (130w as opposed to 105w for a Q6700, 65w for the E4500).

You'd also probably need to replace your cooler to cope with the higher power usage.

(Sorry if I a bit of a geek out there, used to work at Intel and did a lot with the Core 2 era chips smile)

davepoth

29,395 posts

198 months

Friday 23rd September 2016
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You shouldn't need a new processor for what you're doing.

What version of windows are you running? How much RAM do you have?

Mattt

16,661 posts

217 months

Saturday 24th September 2016
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From previous experience, it's going to much simpler (and potentially cheaper in the long term) to just buy yourself a new PC - you can get decent spec machines for low prices from somewhere like the Dell Outlet.

bitchstewie

50,767 posts

209 months

Saturday 24th September 2016
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If it's ten years old just buy a new computer for £300 and repeat the process every few years.

I would look at whether the PC you have is up to date, running antivirus, and would see what an anti-malware scan uncovers as svchost.exe can be indicative of a few things.

Either way, ten years old is pushing it a bit and if you take it to a PC place it's going to be a fine line IMO between paying them to do stuff vs. just start clean.

AJB88

12,263 posts

170 months

Sunday 25th September 2016
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Buy a £1200 Macbook Pro that will solve all your issues.




rolleyes

daemon

35,720 posts

196 months

Sunday 25th September 2016
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Winky151 said:
I'm sure I'm one of the many who use a PC everyday but haven't got a clue about them (got techies at work to fix things). My home PC use is emails, a bit of surfing, the odd excel document & holiday/car show pics (NO gaming at all). Its probably about 10 years old but fine for what I need except currently getting a lot of CPU usage (svchost which I kill the odd thing) but I want to upgrade the CPU anyway. The current one is an Intel e4500. What can I get that will be faster & a straight swap?

TIA
I've a nine year old core 2 duo laptop thats running great.

I did the following

Upgrade to Win10 (not free anymore but not expensive either)
Upgraded to 4GB of RAM - bought second hand off of ebay for i think it was a tenner.
Converted to a 128GB SSD - cost £24.95 delivered off of Amazon.

ALTHOUGH, if i were you i'd also consider something like an i5 ex business desktop running Win 10.

Heres probably the starting point for price...

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Lenovo-ThinkCentre-M91P-...

You should get an easy 5 years out of that.


Edited by daemon on Sunday 25th September 12:31

chris285

811 posts

131 months

Monday 26th September 2016
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You won't be able to get a new replacement CPU as chipset is too old I should think, as stated second hand Q6600 if supported is your best bet and as for SSD depends on the board as I had issues with my old board on my Q6600. I couldn't have an SSD and a old HDD connected if you had stuff you wanted to keep

Best thing would be to just buy a new machine, sounds like a laptop would do the job tbh