Need some help with a processor upgrade

FishMist

I’m thinking about upgrading my processor soon but I’m having trouble trying to find a place online to buy a new one.

I have a Gigabyte GA-8S648FX-L motherboard so here is the listed of supported processors on Gigabyte’s website:

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/CPUSupport_List.aspx?ProductID=1665

My current processor is a Pentium 4 2.4GHz 533FSB (Northwood I believe). Seems to me that my best bet would be to get a P4-Northwood with 800FSB and HT. Since I live in Australia I have been using www.staticice.com.au to try and find one of these for sale online (staticice is a damn fine site for finding computer stuff online from heaps of different retailers). However nothing much is coming up there for the search terms “Northwood 800 FSB HT” or combinations thereof. I get one result for just “Northwood” but the link to the retailer is dead; also $324 AUD for a 2.8GHz processor seems a bit pricy anyway.

So I am I using the wrong search terms do you think? Or are these processors discontinued now? Does anyone think that there are other processors not mentioned in the above gigabyte link that would work on my motherboard that I should look at?

Glaeal

Socket 478 processors. Try searching for that.

As far as upgrading, someone smarter than me will need to fill in there.

robaal

Yeah, northwoods are a bit dead and with older platforms it's usually cheaper to buy a new motherboard and CPU than just an older CPU.

The newest CPUs offer much better performance than your present one, and they are dual-core. You'd need to buy new RAM though, as everyone switched to DDR2.

AGP is also dead so on one hand you'd get the new PCI Express slot, but on the other one you'd need to get a new video card.


The cheapest upgrade that would let you play games at some reasonable settings would be to get a socket 939 nforce4-based motherboard, an Athlon 64 3800+ or maybe 3500+ if the price difference is significant, and a PCI-E 7900GS or 7600GT. This is assuming you already have 1GB of dual-channel DDR400 RAM. Be aware that there won't be any new socket 939 CPUs coming out so in the future you're very likely to have a similar problem to the present one, where the fastest s939 CPUs will be unreasonably expensive.

If you don't need to play games you could go with an nforce3 motherboard, which IIRC use AGP; this would be awful from a PC-gamers perspective, as most new video cards are PCI-E and the few ones that do get adapted to AGP are overpriced or just slow.

Socket 939 CPUs can work with RAM slower than DDR400, but I'm not sure what impact it has on their performance. If you have less than 1GB and would need/want to buy more then it would be a better idea to jump to socket AM2 as DDR2-667 RAM costs about the same as DDR400 RAM and the motherboards aren't much more expensive.