Hey I'm just looking for opinions on whether or not to scrap this machine. Its an Emachine that my mother gave me almost a year ago, I would like to upgrade it, but I don't know if it would be a waste of time. Heres my specs: Im not sure what the mobo is, but its socket 478, has no agp/pci-x slots Im running a 128mb PCI Radeon, but on pci theres only so much it can do. Its got a Celeron D running at 2.93ghz. What I'm considering is putting a P4 in that socket, seeing how much more that will help. But Im afraid that that will just cause bottlenecking and not increase performance at all. This system runs HL2 pretty well, but my Athlon runs it much better. Basicaly the reason that I use this compuer more often is that it has a nicer computer desk. Of course I could always add more ram, Im running at 512 right now, but theres still the issue of that no pcix/agp thing. I could probably afford to at least get a good start on building another athlon to take the place of this computer, but I would like to keep it if its gonna be at all possible to upgrade.
I've got a very similar emachines set up which I bought last year. Had I known what I do now about PCs, I wouldn't have touched it with a barch pole! My emachines model features a 2.8 GHz Celeron 4 CPU. Coincidentally, i am also stuck using a ATi Radeon 128MB PCI card as there is no AGP or PCI-E. To answer you question, I would definately get rid of the emachines PC and change it for something else. Putting a Pentium 4 chip in it would be like putting a turbo engine in an old Camper Van! On first inspection, emachines PC's look quite good, especially for the price. It's when you take a closer look, you see where they have cut corners. For example, there is no SATA, my HDD only has 1 MB of Cache!! The motherboard front side bus only runs at a measly 233MHz or so with PC2700 DDR RAM. The PSU is totally generic and only 235W! I can't see that lasting long. And to cap it off, it's got the AC'97 integrated audio chip. Although this set up might be fine for the casual internet browser, other people will want more. My computer lacks when it comes to video encoding with Dr DivX, playing any kind of game, and generally any heavy hard disk operations.
I would not scrap a thing. First, you can sell it whole or in bits. Someone might want it for the following reasons - you could use it as a workstation or a firewall. Find a poor student and give it to him/her.....
I've just remembered an excellent resource for emachines PCs. They seem to have a strong following in certain circles. hah: Go to www.emachineupgraders.info for full information about your model, including motherboard, chipset and drivers. Emachines used to make an imac like PC with all the components and screen in the same housing. It was called the eOne and normally shipped with a Celeron CPU. They had to discontinue the product line as they were threatened with legal action from Apple! It's ashame because I thought it was the best thing they have produced.
eMachine PSUs and motherboards are terrible, and Celerons aren't the cream of the crop either, so I wouldn't even try to upgrade. I know upgrading is always tempting, but once you'd actually replaced enough components to make the system worth the upgrade, it wouldn't be cost-effective at all. You're much better off using the eMachine for whatever it's still good for and building a new system from scratch. At least that way you'd have one nice working system and one poor but working system rather than just one mediocre system, and there wouldn't be much of a price difference.
Selling it would be included in my definition of scrapping it, and man would I love to sell this thing, any clues on how much I could get for it?
Second hand Celeron based PCs do not sell very well at all, especially when they are made by Emachines. You could probably expect £200 max without monitor. What you need to remember is that these days you can buy a brand new computer for less then £250, sometimes with a CRT monitor as well. Have a look at some of the cheap crap Dell keeps pushing out.
That would be about... 350 american? That sounds great to me, it would be enough of a kickstart to get my next project up and rolling. I'll pop it on ebay with the dvd-burner in it, thats always enticing to people who dont know a lot about computers. 250$ computer + 40$ DVD burner = 400$ computer!
