PIII 450 How Should I upgrade?

Jamie,

Unfortunately you may not be able to upgrade the CPU.  You can upgrade the ram "most likely"  and the Video card.  But The Motherboard is proprietary.  Also P3's are not too easy to come by and can generally cost more than P4's.  My suggestions are this:

1.  Leave the old machine intact, give it to the kids a niece or nephew?  Grandchildren?!  etc...Donate it as a tax write off?

or...

2.  Part out what you can from this Dell Dimension XPS T450 machine.  And salvage what you can.  And get a new Case and motherboard and CPU etc...and salvage the rest.

3.  Try to find a P3 processor that will work with your old board that is faster than what you have now.  And upgrade your ram if possible.  I am guessing your ram is PC133 or PC100.  So should be cheap and still fairly easy to find if you get PC133. PC100 is hard to find.

P3 processors: http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?submit=manufactory&catalog=343&manufactory=1157&DEPA=1&sortby=14&order=1
Ranging from around $45.00 and up.  Not many available.  1.0 - 1.4 ghz.  some are Intel Celeron 3's...so keep in mind what your machine can handle.
It may not be able to use 1ghz processors and up.

PC133 ram:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduct.asp?submit=memory&DEPA=1

starts at like $18.00 for 64 mb stick...kind of expensive.

Found this:
http://www.pcclub.com/product_subcategory.cfm?subcategory1=Memory&subcategory2=Desktop&subcategory3=SDRAM
PC Club has 128 mb for $18.00

Anyway good luck!

You will see the biggest increase with a new video card - preferable one with DDR ram.  I think you will be impressed at the difference.

Mike

No, you will not, quite often, mid-low end computers like this one will experience a slower performance due to a higher end graphics card, it would be best, as wakeup said, to salvage whatever you can, or give to a relative or friend.  Also, I find that Dell, or any other proprietary computers, such as IBM or COMPAQ do not function very well without thier inborn components and/or drivers.

However, if you just want to play max payne and MOH, you COULD try a new video card, since 450MHz and 256 MB ram is enough, and the ATI is not a really good gaming card.  Although at the rate the complexity of graphics is increasing, you would probably need a new system to play most of the games comming out anyways.

Besides, a new computer for gaming won't cost more than $1,000(US), and it would be a fairly good investment for future purposes.

I would at least see if a new card works before I spent all of that money - after all, you can always use the new card on a new computer if you decide it's not good enough on the old one.  I used a gforce2 ti with 64 MB DDR on a piii500, and it worked fine for games.


Mike