Help with an older computer upgrade choices

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Limp Gawd
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Sep 25, 2002
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I have an older computer I am upgrading for my 16 year old niece. She will probably only use it for surfing and school homework. She says she would like to play around with photoshop also. I installed XP pro, Office XP and an older adobe suite with Photoshop 7 for her. I already maxed out the ram @ 2 gigs. It has this intel mother board with the earlier revision. I cannot use the "9" series processors. It has a a Pentium 4 524 @ 3.06 GHz in there right now. I am debating putting either a Pentium 4 661 @ 3.6 GHz or a Pentium D 820 @ 2.8 GHz in it's place.

My question is will there be any noticeable performance jump with the new setup.
Is it even worth doing? Would the 820's slower clock speed make up the difference because it is a duel core? Would the 661 have the edge with the higher clock speed? Should I just leave it alone and give it back to her as it is? What are everyones thoughts on this?

Thanks
 
I would go with the pentium D, I have run both in my current setup, and there is a noticable difference in responsiveness with the dual core, even with the lower clock speed. Photoshop would probably like it as well.
 
Or you could go Celeron DC (don't laugh; there's a reason for the suggestion).
The Celeron DC is the baby-brother of the Pentium DC; the only difference is the onboard cache. My own crossgrade is powered by such a Celeron (the E1200), even stock, the system is pretty darn snappy, which is more than I could say about the P4 2.6 Northwood-C I was running before (and the Northwood-C was mildly overcranked; the Celly is still bone-stock). Because the motherboard (the one in my revised sig) also includes a PCIeX 16 slot, I can swap in faster graphics when I can afford them. At some point, I'm even putting my X-Fi back in; I just finished the OS install, and still have other things to do.
 
Depending on how much you are wanting to spend, another HDD can make a big deal in photoshop, whether used as the main or as a scratch disk, out of everything I have done with my set up, the 2nd scratch disk did the most for photoshop. Good thing about HDD's is they can be carried over to another or new system when the time comes.
 
cyclone3d said:
I would go with a Pentium D for that system.

If you don't mind Using Ebay, you can get a much better price on a Pentium D processor. There is a Pentium D 830 on there right now with about 4 hours left that is at $45 right now.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Intel-Pentium-D...3286.c0.m14&_trkparms=66:2|65:1|39:1|240:1318
Click to expand...

That's funny; my E1200 (three-year warranty and all) cost that much.

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0287950

Picked it up Monday at the Fairfax, VA store right when they opened.
 
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nothing wrong with that 3 gig what kind of harddrive is in that thing?
 
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