Video card and cpu upgrade

[drjoe4321]

Hi,
Last fall with your help I built my first computer. Thanks again. This build was as follows:

Case: Rosewill
PSU: Rosewill 600w
Motherboard: Abit I35-E
CPU: Intel Celeron 420
RAM: 2gb OCZ Reaper
Graphics card: Foxconn 8400 GS
Sound card: integrated
Hard Drive(s): 2 500GB Seagate SATA's
Optical Drive(s): Samsung dl dvdrw

Monitor: Hans G 22" lcd
Speakers:

Operating System: Win xp home

System works fine for Photoshop & Premier Elements, Roxio EMC 9 and runs older games.

The upgrades, which I will do in a few days include Intel E7200, and MSI 8800GTOC and Arctic Freezer 7 cpu cooler.

While I did build a computer last fall I realize that I know very little at this point. I plan to install the MSI card first...following Robs online directions to uninstall old drivers. I think that the driver cd shoud be pretty up to date but will check it online after the install. Do I have to use Driver Cleaner as per Robs advice? For the CPU upgrade, does the motherboard have to be taken out of the case? I'd prefer not to disconnect everything to do that and I think that the mb should be inside the case for the Arctic Freezer installation.

You guys were a great help last time. Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks.

[RickyTick]

At $132 and free shipping from Newegg, the E7200 is hard to beat. It performs only slightly slower than the E6750 but has more headroom for overclocking. Get it now before its too late.

A better 'Bang for the Buck" video card is the 8800GTS 512mb. I prefer to use EVGA cards, but thats just me. Another card to put high on a wish list is the 9600GT, which is very close in performance to the 8800GT.

Depending on how much room is in your case, you may be able to inslall the cpu and cooler without removing them from your case. That would be great, huh.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/690/1/

Best of luck.

[drjoe4321]

I already have the cpu and video card and am set to go. I'm sure that I'll be back for advice when I run into trouble.

I plan to use the Celeron cpu and video card in a small form factor pc and will be using the Antec Aria case and psu and put it in my den using a 50" Vizio plasma display. I have all the components but that is for next week. I'll be back with that one in a week or so. Thanks again!

[drjoe4321]

By the way, one of the reasons for choosing the E7200 chip, besides price, was that the Penryn chips contain the SSE4 instruction set which will speed up rendering in the next gen of video processing programs. I recall that 5 or 6 years ago the Adobe forums were full of complaints from AMD usere because those chips did not support SSE3 and were unable to run Adobe Premier Elements.

I don't know if this will occur again with chips that do not have SSE4 but I wantedd to be ready for when I update my software in the fall with the new Adobe release.

Again, I don't know much about the specifics or inportance of this feature, but it might be important to builders whose main interest is in video editing.

[drjoe4321]

So I call up Abit tech support to soo what they have to say about the intel E-7200 processor upgrade. A mostly chineese speaking worker checks out the board (Abit IP-35E) and says that it is not compatible with the E7200 porocessor!!!

I know now that I should have checked with them first, but when I looked at their online compatibility device the E-7200 (as well as the E 8400) was not listed as an option for comparison.

Does anyone know if it is truly incompatible? I will try to go onto the abit forum and see what other users have to say.

I may have to change either the chip or motherboard and will check out the reccommended setups on this forum.

[RickyTick]

I've used the Abit Forums several times for help and found the people there to be very knowledgable and helpful.