How do I know if it's practical to replace just CPU/motherboard versus whole thing?

System has become slower and slower. Have scanned, cleaned and compressed to best of my abilities I believe. The computer has to be at least 6 or 7 years old, built it from scratch. It has an AMD Athlon 1800+ with ECS motherboard. 1 GB of DDR memory and 75 GB with 50 used. Is it practical for me to replace just the motherboard and CPU (is this possible)? Or am I better off buying a whole new tower? Running XP Home, a little nervous about transferring files/programs

 

Re: How do I know if it's practical to replace just CPU/motherboard versus whole thin

Hi

It sounds to me like you could definitely use a new system, but do you have the budget to buy one right now?

If so, a new system would be the obvious choice, because if you replace the motherboard and CPU, you will likely need new RAM as well. Basically, the only thing you would be keeping is your hard drive, possibly power supply, and case, and if you get a new motherboard, you definitely want a new case (cases aren't that expensive anyway). You could even go for a budget system that would definitely out-perform your current rig.

Also, it would be a good investment to get an external hard drive and backup all of your documents, pictures, etc. on it, so when you do end up getting a new system (then you will have to reinstall Windows), it will be relatively painless.

 

Re: How do I know if it's practical to replace just CPU/motherboard versus whole thin

Also a thing to remember is if you make such major changes to your system the OS will no longer work and you will need to buy a new key.

So i suggest that if the budget allows it, buy a new PC with the OS installed.

 

Re: How do I know if it's practical to replace just CPU/motherboard versus whole thin

If your current system isn't a name brand (Dell, HP, Gateway) you can replace the motherboard/CPU/Memory fairly easily as the new board should fit into your existing case. Some older name brand systems had motherboards and cases made just for them and were not standard board layouts.

You can figure on spending about $100-$120 for a motherboard/cpu/memory upgrade using something like a AMD Athlon X2 CPU (2.6Ghz-3Ghz speed), 2Gb of memory and using the built-in video chip on the motherboard. Something like this will surf the web, run Office, play video and light-duty games.

Newegg.com has combo motherboard/cpu deals all the time. I just got a Biostar MCP6P-M2+ AMD motherboard with a AMD Athlon X-II 7850 2.8 Ghz dual core CPU for $70 as a combo deal. $30 for 2Gb of memory. Something like this has a built-in video chip (or you can add a PCI or PCIexpress slot video card) and you can reuse your existing hard drive and CD/DVD drive (either IDE or SATA interface). If your old computer uses an AGP slot video card these will NOT work in new motherboards, they don't have AGP card slots anymore.

If you play games figure another $100-$300 for the caliber of video card you need.

You would need to reinstall XP so a backup of all data you would need for the programs you would be reinstalling afterward is needed.

Sam