Heres the thing, this little PC that i have bought came with a pentium4 2.8 ghz, which isnt exactly gonna set the world alight, but it uses a much more modern board, (compared to my last 2 p4 powered PC's which were all socket478) a Hewlett-Packard (HP) 09E8h, which runs the socket 775 LGA setup, which seems to be intriguing, as according to wiki anyway, this socket can support upto an intel core 2 quad CPU @ 3.0ghz, which im guessing would be pretty amazing performance wise as opposed to the p4 it has now.

Now i know bits and bobs about working with and building PC's but i have only really replaced things like processors on a like for like basis, for instance remove a dead p4 chip and refit an identical working p4 chip, so i havent had any experience on an upgrade of this type, thats if its possible.

Im presuming that i will need a massively larger heat sync and fan(s) if i want to do this, plus many other things that i probably do not know about.

Would there be much involved to do this, will i need to replace loads of other parts such as PSU etc, or would it be relitavely straight forward?

Many thanks in advance!

the stock 775 fan shouldn't be that much bigger than the 478 ones.

just remember to put the chip in the right way or you'll crush it when you close the metal door.

edit: you might need a bigger power supply, if you're using something silly like 250w. i'd say 350/400 should do though.

Just because it runs 775 doesn't mean a Core 2 Quad will drop straight in. May need a BIOS upgrade or may just not be supported full stop.

This depends a lot on a chipset, but the odds are that your MB won't support Core 2 CPUs...

Yeah. You can probably find the motherboard model from typing in the model of your computer. If it is a on-shelf motherboard, you may be able to find a new BIOS that can accomodate the newer gen 775 CPUs, if it doesn't already (which I am thinking not).

This isn't from fact, but I'd presume that OEMs use their own set of motherboards for profitability sake, and they probably won't hand out BIOSes online; they don't expect, and don't want you to upgrade your CPU. They'd probably convince you into buying new computer altogether.

Heatsink-wise, if this was a heatsink from a stock Pentium 4, it should be big enough and good enough to run the more modern Core 2 Duos (which aren't really modern if you think about it). They do run a lot cooler than the ancient Netburst tech. So if it was indeed a heatsink that you would've found in those P4s in the day, it should run fine.

It isn't those tiny fans that you get from Penryns

EDIT: No luck... I've seen one or two hits from typing in "HP 09E8h" in google, but I can't get the specs. It is supposedly an OEM motherboard. But I'd say you'd get a lot more chance if you ran something like Everest, or CPUz to identify your motherboard, NB/SB for further identification. Maybe it has an on-shelf counterpart that share common parts. We may be able to find out what CPUs it can upgrade to. But things don't seem awfully optimistic at this point.

Cheers! xD

Cheers for that.

I ran cpu-z but it didnt really tell me anything more than pc wizard already had



I too have googled, and i also mailed HP to see if there is a mobo manual available anywhere for this board, but to be honest i aint holding my breath on that one.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I have MB with exactly this chipset and I'm quite sure that it won't take any Core2 CPU. Wiki seems to agree with me. Anyway, you can get Core2 compatible MB for less than €40, so if you have PCI-Express graphics and DDR2 RAM, you still should be able to upgrade for somewhat reasonable price.

Quote from MadCatX :

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I have MB with exactly this chipset and I'm quite sure that it won't take any Core2 CPU. Wiki seems to agree with me. Anyway, you can get Core2 compatible MB for less than €40, so if you have PCI-Express graphics and DDR2 RAM, you still should be able to upgrade for somewhat reasonable price.

I agree with MadCat. Here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/fo ... 9040-28-45nm-i915-chipset

They say that the chances of getting a BIOS update is slim with OEMs, because they lock it down; commercial reasons, to make you buy a new computer

If you were to actually get a Core 2 Duo system, it wouldn't be too expensive. If that's all you want to do, a new 775 board that gets that job done is as cheap as $30, 40 these days, and just throw in a cheap 45 nm Pentium Dual Core with 2MB L2, which is stock for a C2D in the early days, and you'll be set. Those things can clock up to 4 Ghz sometimes, on air, and you'll be running E84 like performance for merely $90 for mobo+cpu. (you may not get such high clocks on lower end chipsets, but raising the FSB is easy, and 3.4 is no problem, and would blow the Netburst based CPUs out of the park running, but still, NOT FAST ENOUGH =DDDD. or, you can get a higher end 775 CPU.

DDR2 Ram isn't all that expensive either. I'd say that a rebuild would be the realistic option to get more performance, and it doesn't have to be LGA775. AMD builds are also a great bang for the buck these days too!