My wife inherited my Dell 4600 when I built my AMD 64 SLI rig. It is fine for what it does but it is freakin slow as hell and I can't understand why? The CPU is a P4C 2.6GHZ (Northwood Core) running on a 800MHZ FSB. Has 1GB of PC3200 DDR 400 RAM in it. Chipset is a little confusing (this may be the problem) CPUz states the it is: i865P/PE/G/i848P . WTF. Did Dell stick several different codes on one chipset to accomodate different CPU's? Is this the cause of the slowdown or is it Dells proprietary BIOS?
Anyways, my question to you folks that are smarter on Intel than I, is:
1. Would it be worth it to scrap the Dell mobo and case and rebuild a system arouns this CPU (still $250 at ZZF)? Would I see and appreciable performance increase? The reason this is practical is that I have a lot of parts laying around (corsair RAM PSU drives) and plugged a 6800 vanilla in there a year ago so I really only need a case and mobo.
2. What mobo would be a good fit? Am I limited to the 865 chipset?
I am not going to do a clean install of Windows on the Dell mobo, just isn't worth it, I would guess, as I'd still be saddled with the Dell BIOS and I have heard that the Dell BIOS doesn't like to run without the proprietary version of XP loaded.
TIA
Anyways, my question to you folks that are smarter on Intel than I, is:
1. Would it be worth it to scrap the Dell mobo and case and rebuild a system arouns this CPU (still $250 at ZZF)? Would I see and appreciable performance increase? The reason this is practical is that I have a lot of parts laying around (corsair RAM PSU drives) and plugged a 6800 vanilla in there a year ago so I really only need a case and mobo.
2. What mobo would be a good fit? Am I limited to the 865 chipset?
I am not going to do a clean install of Windows on the Dell mobo, just isn't worth it, I would guess, as I'd still be saddled with the Dell BIOS and I have heard that the Dell BIOS doesn't like to run without the proprietary version of XP loaded.
TIA