WE CAN
REBUILD IT
S
o your store-bought PC is getting a little
long in the tooth and its performance is
showing signs of age. You might be tempt-
ed to just toss the machine and replace it
with a newer model, especially when you
see that more powerful OEM PCs can be had for as
little as $500. But before you get on the horn to Dell,
ask yourself this: What would a power user do (short
of having built their own rig to begin with, naturally)?
The answer: upgrade.
In many instances, you can achieve even greater
performance gains with a $500 upgrade than you can
from a new $500 machine. Even Dell’s proprietary
builds can be retrofi tted into better shape.
The skill is in knowing when it’s right to upgrade
and how much upgrading is warranted. Too oft en,
what begins as a simple upgrade can end up as a box
full of regrets. Instead of achieving blistering perfor-
mance, people oft en fi nd that they’ve just thrown good
money aft er bad hardware.
This brings us to the fi rst rule of upgrading: Know
your needs. Are you aft er higher frame rates and the
ability to game at higher resolutions? You’ll need a
new graphics card. Are you tired of waiting hours for
your video editing to fi nish or the eternity it takes to
edit your photos? A new CPU is in order.
Aft er you’ve determined your goals, set a budget.
Can you spend $200 or $2,000? Finally, the hard-
est question will be whether it makes sense to evenperform an upgrade. This is the part that usually trips
us all up. Folks are oft en compelled to upgrade old
machines out of loyalty, as though that box of silicon,
tin, and plastic was the starship Enterprise. The truth
is that it’s just a bunch of commodity parts that you
probably can’t sell on eBay for a quarter of what you
originally paid.
So ask yourself, does it make sense to spend $
on a 3.4GHz Socket 478 Pentium 4 for that old 2.6GHz
P4 box? Do you really want to buy a $200 AGP card
for your Athlon XP system? We’re not so sure.
Even worse, like plumbing and car repairs,
oft entimes upgrades can cause you to replace more
parts than you originally intended. Say you buy a hot,
new AGP card for your Athlon XP 3000+ box. You’ll
soon discover that the PSU in your vintage machine
is underpowered. New PSU. Cha-ching. But now
that swanky PSU doesn’t fi t in your case. New case.
Cha-ching. In the end, you just spent $500 for minimal
performance gains.
Over the following pages, we’ll walk you
through three real-world upgrade scenarios using
three very different old off-the-shelf computers,
so you can see first-hand our approach to bringing
these rigs up to modern standards. Your upgrade
needs won’t necessarily be the same, but by under-
standing how we made our decisions concerning
what to upgrade, you’ll be more prepared to tackle
the task yourself.22 | MAXIMUMPC | JUN 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com
Why suffer the subpar performance of an old retail PC?
Your computer can be made better, faster, stronger. We
have the technology, so let us show you how BY GORDON MAH UNG