i was wondering is it worth upgrading my cpu from a pentium 4 2.5 ghz to 3 ghz new egg has a deal on a chip for about 75-80 somewhere in there will i even see a differance mind you i dont do much computer gaming so i dont exaxtly need a lot of power in my machine but i figure its only 80 bucks and i think that is the highest i can go without upgrading my mb which is practicaly new

 

There may be better things to spend your money on to upgrade your computer depending on what you use it for and what in particular you feel is slow about it.

There are many times where the CPU is not the limiting factor.

 

How much RAM do you have? Any free slots, cuz you can find some deals on RAM and will notice more of a differance than 500mhz of processor. I would suggest putting as much RAM in that your MB will support, but if your dead set on more processing power then $80 isn't that bad.

 

its only 80 cuz it dosent have the colling its chip only i currently have 768mb it runs fast enough i just want to upgrade something out of bordem with it but dont want to spend a lot of cash maybe i should get another 256 to make an even gig i think my mb can handle 2g max id have to check my book

 

What do you use your computer for mostly? An upgrade from 1GB to 2GB on my computer made some operations in photoshop run 50 times faster than they used to. I had one script to blend frames to make an HDR image that took just under an hour to complete because the system continuously swapped data on and off the hard drive. Now that there's enough RAM to hold everything, the same process takes just over a minute. The fastest CPU in the world wouldn't have helped me because the limiting factor was moving the data around.

 

ram ram and more ram.......

 

It all depends on what your using it for. A new graphics card can make a huge differnce as well.

 

If you current p4 is non HT and the new one is, I would go for it.
That gives a pretty tangible boost in multitasking, though not as much as a true dual processor machine.

There is a world of difference between my grandparents non ht 2.7 p4 and my friends 2.4 ghz ht p4, in the 2.4 ghz machines favor.

 

if that's the case, you should upgrade the RAM first. put at least another gig in there, you can easily do that for around 80 bucks.

 

yea i feel my computer is limited right now too cause it only has 1gb of ram, whenever i run WoW that shit takes up like 700megs of ram, leaving 300 for windows and whatever else i might have running.

 

my gpu is an ati card xtasy 9550 that i upgraded and it was a big jump i was running the movies on its lowest setting just to be able to play before and i now i run it on its highest and its faster than before im not much on computer games my gaming is done on console but i do wish i could do things like burn movies or make videos faster the actuall burning is fine but doing things like converting video files it takes a long time and doing things like that always takes 100% of cpu usage oh and my have 12285mb of virtual mem

 

how can i check what type of memory i have without opening up my case i cant remember what type i have