Ageing PC, potential upgrades?

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Hi all.

I have a pretty old PC that I use for minor tasks, very light gaming (old titles), and general office work.

It’s really starting to grind to a halt now, which is quite annoying.

I was wondering if there is anything I can to to give it a boost? Or is it even worth it?

I don’t do overclocking unfortunately. Here is the current spec:

Intel Q6600 CPU
GIGABYTE GA-P35 DS3L motherboard
4x1gb 6400 DDR2 RAM
MSI 460GTX GPU
ASUS Xonar D2
650W PSU
2 standard hard drives

Thanks!
 
Soldato
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Adding an SSD would be worthwhile and could be reused if you end up replacing the entire PC.

I’d also consider get more memory installed if you can get it cheaply enough. I’d be looking at the secondhand market.

I wouldn’t do anymore than that. It’s too old to sink any significant money into.
 
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An SSD will give you the most immediate and noticeable boost, and can be had for £20-30. Adding some RAM should also be cheap and easy.

If you're gaming, there's an abundance of faster graphics cards, even if you grab a second hand one for £50. Obviously there's is the risk of the CPU not keeping up once you approach even moderately current cards - but it could still be a worthy upgrade if you'll upgrade the CPU in the near future.

Sadly that CPU shines when overclocked so I would recommend at least trying a mild overclock to boost performance. There will be plenty of guides available. This is assuming you have a decent cooler.

In reality though I would weigh up cost - a very basic office PC can be had second hand that would outperform this, with an i5-2400 or similar. However that wouldn't be particularly flexible for future upgrades.
 
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Adding an SSD would be worthwhile and could be reused if you end up replacing the entire PC.

I’d also consider get more memory installed if you can get it cheaply enough. I’d be looking at the secondhand market.

I wouldn’t do anymore than that. It’s too old to sink any significant money into.

Thanks, does this board support up to 8gb DDR2? I just assumed 4gb was maxed out.
 
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An SSD will give you the most immediate and noticeable boost, and can be had for £20-30. Adding some RAM should also be cheap and easy.

If you're gaming, there's an abundance of faster graphics cards, even if you grab a second hand one for £50. Obviously there's is the risk of the CPU not keeping up once you approach even moderately current cards - but it could still be a worthy upgrade if you'll upgrade the CPU in the near future.

Sadly that CPU shines when overclocked so I would recommend at least trying a mild overclock to boost performance. There will be plenty of guides available. This is assuming you have a decent cooler.

In reality though I would weigh up cost - a very basic office PC can be had second hand that would outperform this, with an i5-2400 or similar. However that wouldn't be particularly flexible for future upgrades.
Thanks! The cooler is one of those arctic thingies, so yeah I guess it could put up with a OC. I might have a look into it
 

gEd

gEd

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SSD will transform your day to day experience. I wouldn’t bother with anything else.

This. An SSD utterly transforms the performance of a PC compared to mechanical drives. You can use a disk cloning app to copy your C drive to the new SSD so you won't have to reinstall windows and your apps.
That mobo can take 8GB but whether it's required or not depends on RAM usage (check in task manager). It's not worth throwing money at that PC on kit that can't be used in a newer PC down the road.
 
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Can somebody please advise me as to whether or not the following memory will work with my pc spec?

Corsair XMS2 Dominator 4x2gb DDR2 1066MHz CM2X2048-8500CD5 Memory

Many thanks
 
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GIGABYTE GA-P35 DS3L, which revision is the board ?

You could also check second hand market for the CPU upgrade. You could find something more powerful for around 25 gbp mark.

Here's a list of revision.2 supported cpus:

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-P35-DS3L-rev-20#support-cpu

There's few extreme CPU's that seem interesting and could give you a boost.

Together with SSD and maybe a bit more ram it might be still valuable for awhile.
 
Soldato
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Add an SSD, and upgrade to 8GB, will extend the glide on the machine.

Could do a small overclock or change to a faster CPU, however above are the most important.
 
Soldato
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Cheers, I’m awaiting delivery of a 480gb ssd drive as we speak

Something I thought about after I posted.

Probably be fine, however that board is old in years, things like capacitors won't be quite the same as they were when new. If your getting a more powerful processor, it will either be 95w, or 130w category. As said probably be fine, but you would be putting more load/wattage into that older board if replacing the CPU.
 
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Something I thought about after I posted.

Probably be fine, however that board is old in years, things like capacitors won't be quite the same as they were when new. If your getting a more powerful processor, it will either be 95w, or 130w category. As said probably be fine, but you would be putting more load/wattage into that older board if replacing the CPU.

I think I’ll attempt to OC my 6600 first, never overclocked before but there are plenty of videos out there detailing how to OC this cpu on a gigabyte board.
 
Soldato
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I think I’ll attempt to OC my 6600 first, never overclocked before but there are plenty of videos out there detailing how to OC this cpu on a gigabyte board.

Update the boards BIOS to latest if not already, then look for something in BIOS called CIA2.

It's automatic overclocking, however it's clever as it only over clocks when the CPU is under load. CIA2 was a forerunner to turbo boost that came on later i5 and i7 CPU's.

When you enable CIA2 there are different levels, start with the lowest first that gives if I remember a 7% CPU boost. If things are stable then try the next higher setting. One thing CIA2 also over-clocks memory, you might want to eventually down clock the memory, to allow more CIA2 boost.

https://www.gigabyte.com/microsite/121/tech_20041125_px_cia2.htm
 
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Update the boards BIOS to latest if not already, then look for something in BIOS called CIA2.

It's automatic overclocking, however it's clever as it only over clocks when the CPU is under load. CIA2 was a forerunner to turbo boost that came on later i5 and i7 CPU's.

When you enable CIA2 there are different levels, start with the lowest first that gives if I remember a 7% CPU boost. If things are stable then try the next higher setting. One thing CIA2 also over-clocks memory, you might want to eventually down clock the memory, to allow more CIA2 boost.

https://www.gigabyte.com/microsite/121/tech_20041125_px_cia2.htm

Thanks for that, I’ll definitely have a play once my new ssd and ram are delivered
 
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