We Can Rebuild It

Posted 05/27/2008 at 10:24am | by Gordon Mah Ung

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Our Dell Upgrades

Total Upgrade Cost: $369

We turned this turkey into a usable machine that would give us moderate gaming performance and handle most medium-intensity tasks. We concentrated our upgrades on graphics, RAM, and a drop-in hard drive for additional storage capabilities.

A $160 GeForce 9600 GT is several times faster than the ancient ATI FireGL V3100 that came with the Dell.

GPU

Since the 3.8GHz P4 CPU is still serviceable (albeit barely), our first upgrade target was the substandard FireGL V3100 graphics card. We looked at two contenders: Nvidia’s GeForce 9600 GT and the GeForce 8800 GT. Both feature 512MB frame buffers, but the 9600 GT sports the newer G94 core. The 8800 GT is faster at higher resolutions, but given the potential of a single-core Pentium 4, we felt it was more prudent to save our ducats for now. Still, putting in a $160 card takes us from a machine that’s worthless at gaming to one that can play most of today’s popular titles at normal resolutions. Even better, GPUs are in flux now. AMD and Nvidia are in a GPU price war, so expect the 9600 GT to be even cheaper by the time you read this.
Before the GPU upgrade, the Precision was about 75 percent slower than the $500 box in our Unreal Tournament 3 benchmark. After the upgrade, the Precision was 158 percent faster.

Instead of hunting down ECC RAM, we replaced the rig’s pair of 512MB DIMMS with a pair of 1GB DIMMs. Don’t mix ’n’ match ECC and non-ECC though.

RAM

With RAM as cheap as it is these days, it’s an obvious upgrade choice. It’s so cheap, in fact, we decided to ditch the two 512MB ECC DIMMs in the Precision and replace them with a pair of standard 1GB Corsair DDR2/667 modules for $40. Some people believe that ECC RAM slightly hinders performance, but we were more motivated by the performance benefits we’d gain by moving the machine from its 1GB of RAM to 2GB—the optimal amount for a 32-bit OS.

CPU

A $169 Seagate 750GB drive makes good upgrade sense, as it can be easily transplanted into a new machine.

As we mentioned earlier, the system’s 925X chipset prevented us from using dual-core processors, to say nothing of quads. The one option available is the 2MB L2 version of the Pentium 4 Prescott that Intel released near the end of that CPU’s run. The P4 670 can still be had if you search the nooks and crannies of the Internet, but once you find one, be prepared to shell out some bucks for it. The two sites we found that stocked the processor were charging $199 for it. Even the secondary market—that’s fancy speak for “used”—wanted $100 for a 3.8 P4. That just ain’t worth it. Doubling the L2 cache gets you, what, maybe a few percentage points of improvement in a few applications? It’s not worth the money or the hassle. The highest clocked single-core Pentium 4 is still a dog, but not dead meat on a stick, so we’re sticking with it. Our ProShow Producer test pegs the P4 at about 30 percent slower than the $500 rig’s 1.8GHz dual-core Pentium, while PCMark05 puts the P4 slightly ahead.

Hard Drive

You know things are bad when your iPod has more storage capacity than your computer. The 80GB drive in the Dell isn’t even big enough to be puny. To supplement our storage, we dropped in a $169 Seagate 750GB Barracuda drive for secondary storage. Hard drives (and to some extent optical drives) usually break the upgrading rules on spending because they’re easily transportable. Even if we paid $500 for two 1TB drives, we could easily move those to the next machine that we build.

Next: CyberPower Core 2 Duo