MaximumPC 2008 06

W

hen it was released almost three

years ago, Dell’s Precision 370

(a business-class workstation

version of the Dimension) was state of the

art with its PCI Express and DDR2 RAM.

Today, the box is an ancient hunk of junk

that wouldn’t fetch $150 on Craigslist.

The Precision 370 features a 3.8GHz

Pentium 4 proc, 1GB of DDR2 ECC, a

FireGL V3100 graphics card, an 80GB

SATA hard drive, and a combo DVD

burner. Our initial plan was to replace the

single-core Pentium 4 with a Core 2 or

even a Pentium D, but the board uses an

Intel 925X chipset, which doesn’t support

any dual-core procs. There was one pro-

cessor upgrade option left, however: The

3.8GHz Pentium 4 in the Precision is a 1MB

L2 Prescott. Intel later released a Pentium

4 670, which was pretty much a 3.8GHz P

but with 2MB of L2 cache.

Another seemingly easy upgrade is

also complicated by the machine’s workstation roots. The Precision

370 uses ECC DDR2 DIMMs. That RAM is more difficult to find and

typically carries a slight price premium.

Given all of this motherboard’s negatives, we thought about

replacing it outright, but this is a Dell, and like many large OEM

rigs, this machine sports a proprietary design. There’s no way in hell

you’re going to drop a standard ATX motherboard into this case.

The weakest link in the Precision is the FireGL V3100 graphics

card. This 128MB frame-buffer card with a four-pixel pipeline is

just about unusable. The card’s best attribute is that it’s PCI Express.

Overall, this machine is borderline recycle-bin material, but the

support for PCI Express and DDR2 convinced us to give it the old

upgrade try.

In its current configuration, it is absolutely useless for gaming

and is a mediocre machine for video and photo editing. A new $

box (see sidebar below) beats it up and down. But let’s see what kind

of performance improvements our upgrades can muster.

24 | MAXIMUMPC | JUN 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com

To Upgrade or Start Fresh?

REALITY CHECK

Before we started, we established a minimum basis for com-

parison. After all, if you spend $500 on an upgrade, will you

really be getting better performance than what a new budget

PC with a warranty offers? To establish our low bar, we looked

at the $500 confi gs of several large OEMs and built a compa-

rable baseline machine to see how well our upgrade boxes

would perform against a brand-new, inexpensive PC. Turns

out, you can get a surprisingly good machine for fi ve Bennies—

we’re talking a dual-core 1.8GHz Pentium E2160, with 2GB of

DDR2, a 250GB hard drive, an Intel Q33-chipset motherboard,

and even an 8500 GT–class card. That’s good eats for the price

and a good platform for future upgrades. Later on, you can go

quad core with either a 65nm or 45nm Intel CPU and drop in a

faster GPU.

This baseline confi g should serve as a guide for deciding

whether an upgrade is worthwhile, and if so, how much is rea-

sonable to spend. If you don’t think your upgraded machine can

outperform this confi guration, it’s time to start fresh.

This is the very bottom end of what we’d consider upgrading

Dell P

CASE STUDY 1

OPERATION UPGRADE