Thinking of replacing AMD3000 socket 939 mounted on a GA-K8NS-939 TO AMD 4000. What things will this effect hard drive, operating system, ram etc.Is this a wise decision. I would appreciate your thoughts and suggesstions. Thanks
I found the info online if somebody else needs it: ITEE - Spike's PC Purchase Guide 2006 Listed below are brief notes about upgrading individual components in the system. CPU: Upgrading the CPU to a faster model can often yield very significant improvements in performance of a system. If you are looking for a general speed improvement and it was a year or more ago that you purchased your system, this is the option to consider first. However it is important to ensure that the new CPU is compatible with your current motherboard, otherwise you will need to meet the cost of a new motherboard also. Also, as noted elsewhere, performance does not scale linearly with processor speed: just because the new processor is twice as fast doesn’t mean that it will run your applications twice as fast. Tom’s Hardware has recently done a review (The Mother of all CPU Charts 2005/2006) contrasting the performance of all recent reviews. Their previous year’s review covered all CPUs from 1995 (the Pentium 100) through to December 2004. If you want figures about how replacing one CPU with another will impact your performance, this is the place to go. In considering an upgrade the following questions need to be answered: (1) What new level of performance should the upgraded system achieve (e.g., run F.E.A.R. without noticeable slowdown)?; (2) What bottlenecks exist in the current system that mean that desired level of performance is not being achieved?; (3) What components need to be upgraded to clear the bottleneck?; (4) Finally, are the considered upgrades economically feasible (is there much saving over purchasing a new system and the advantages of a new system)? Typically upgrades can extend the life of a PC, but only to a degree. There comes a time (e.g., when considering the need to upgrade 2-3 or more components) when it is far more economical to purchase a new system (it may be possible to cannibalise components from the old system such as the monitor or RAM).
i don't see any reason for it to affect other parts, simply an upgrade, as long as its the same socket (939) you should be perfectly fine =) there is a risk your computer might work faster and get higher performance haha id personally save up another 100$ and get an X2 cpu like the 4400 for socket 939, seems more of a better buy for the money it costs with 2x1mb Caches and 2 2.2ghz amd cores (you might need a Bios update for the motherboard to work with the X2's) but thats just me upgrading to a 4000 from a 3000 is always a nice cheap upgrade that can bring up performance
The CPU may help, but that depends on if it's the bottleneck or not. If you have, say 2GB of RAM and a couple of 7900GTX's in SLI, then, the CPU would show an improvement. However, if you're running 512MB of RAM and a GeForce 6200, then, you're not really going to notice it where it would count: gaming. Video editing would show an improvement, but not low-level tasks like websurfing, e-mail, and office apps. Now, it's not something I would entirely discourage, but before you buy that specific part, look at what you're using it for. Games tend to rely more on the graphics card and amount of RAM. If you don't have at least 1GB of RAM and do much gaming at all, I'd strongly encourage putting the money toward that instead. Last year I upgraded my system a little bit: I went from 512MB of RAM to 1GB, a GeForce 6600GT to a GeForce 7900GS, and an Athlon64 3000+ to a 3700+. The RAM upgrade was the most noticeable, and while the 7900GS didn't do that much in smoothing performance at my minimum resolution (1024x768) it's allowing me to game at 1600x1200. I did the CPU upgrade just to buy some more time on my main box, and that's been the least impressive upgrade in terms of performance for what I do.
