For many people, the main reason to replace their current computer is to get a faster processor.
After all, as the “brain” of your personal computer, won’t a faster processor get work done in less time?
Not necessarily.
Not if the programs they use are more “disk intensive” than they are “compute intensive.”
Databases, for example, often get more boost from a faster hard drive than from quicker chips. And if you’re hooked on 3-D graphics for professional design work or serious gaming, your need for speed may be better served by a new graphics accelerator card. Or if you’re looking for better performance when “multitasking”–running several programs at once–then more memory is the key.
Still, a faster processor will probably help in each of those cases, and will be the critical item in calculating large spreadsheets, repaginating desktop publishing documents, and many other “compute intensive” tasks.
I’m always glad to get more megahertz (MHz), the measurement of how many millions of software steps a processor makes each second. Early personal computers only managed 1 to 5 MHz. Today’s machines start at 150 and go to nearly 500 MHz.
And newer processors sometimes bring benefits beyond more MHz. They might have more built-in “instructions.”
For example, Intel’s MMX instructions speed multimedia computing chores such as game graphics and photo editing. A Pentium with MMX, which is also built into all Pentium II chips, will be faster at multimedia than a mere Pentium without the MMX, even at the same speed. However, this is only true for programs that have been rewritten to understand MMX.
New processor designs often have more on-chip “cache”–memory that holds the most frequently needed information–and improved “pipelining”–the way instructions are lined up for their processing turns. Both of those design changes also affect speed. The Pentium II for Windows PCs has such improvements over the Pentium; the latest G3 PowerPC for Macintosh has them over the older 603 and 604 PowerPC.
But it isn’t easy to know if a 300 MHz G3 PowerPC chip in a Mac is faster or slower than a 400 MHz Pentium II chip in a PC, or when you ought to consider a lower-cost Pentium “clone” such as the AMD K6 chip, or even how much advantage a 266 MHz Pentium II has over Intel’s own less-expensive 266 MHz Celeron.
“Benchmark” results can help. These are programs that run a processor through timed, standardized operations.You might already have one at hand, such as the System Information tool in Norton Utilities. This tries to assign a single performance rating to your system. That means it isn’t just testing the processor, but other system elements such as the chip set–all the helper chips around the processor.
But knowing how many times your PC can calculate Pi in a minute isn’t as immediately practical as knowing whether a new processor will speed up word-processing, Web surfing or photo editing. Various computer magazines–including PC, PC World, MacWorld–occasionally publish practical benchmark results, often when comparing several computers with identical speed processors.
With all that in mind, if you’re willing to spend the time and money installing a faster processor, what should you do next?
You could buy an entire new computer, for $1,000 or more. Then you get newer, faster everything, not just the processor.
You could spend a little less to buy new components. Start with a “motherboard”–about $150 to $200–that holds the chipset and has an empty socket for the processor. Then add some random access memory (RAM)–say $100 for 32 megabytes. Finally, plug in a fast processor chip–from $200 for a Pentium II 266 MHz to $700 for a Pentium II 400 MHz.
Then you’d probably want a fast new hard drive . . . wait, this is adding up to a lot of dollars and tech expertise–maybe pushing you back toward that new machine.
Yet there are cheaper and easier ways to get faster processing.
You could “overclock” your current processor. Your processor isn’t actually set to a specific MHz. For example, “300 MHz” really means “guaranteed to run reliably when paced by a 300 MHz clock and surrounded by a chip set that can handle 300 MHz Pentium.” The processor will probably be fine running a little faster than its guaranteed setting, and possibly a lot faster. It depends on whether the motherboard can handle the speed and on the internal quality of the particular processor chip. Even two chips from the same manufacturing batch can have quality differences that mean one runs at 166 MHz and another can reach 233 MHz.
On many computers, but rarely on portables, you can change the processor speed by opening up the computer case and fiddling with the “multiplier” settings.
It’s free.
And it’s a little dangerous. You’ll certainly void the warranty, you could damage chips and connectors during the operation, and you could overheat both your processor and surrounding components once the system is running faster. Overclocking can shorten your computer’s life, temporarily or permanently kill the processor, lead to more frequent crashes as you compute, or, worst of all, even lead to unreliable results–such as unnoticed wrong calculations.
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That’s a lot of risk for simply boosting from, say, 266 Mhz to 300 MHz.
I wouldn’t try it.
It’s safer to actually buy a replacement or “upgrade” processor. You get a guaranteed faster chip and, if you don’t already have them, other new design features such as the MMX instructions, or better cache and pipelining.
The hard part is figuring out whether your PC can accommodate an upgraded processor. You’ll need to know details about the type of socket that holds the chip, the surrounding chipset and the underlying BIOS software that boots your machine at start-up.
There are a few upgrades for 486 systems to either 486 chips or low-level Pentiums; none I can find for 60 and 66 MHz Pentiums, and a variety of upgrade choices for Pentium 75 Mhz to 166 MHz models.
Even after finding the right upgrade, you’ll still need some more tech expertise. You’ll have to open the computer case, find and remove the older processor, plug in the new one, and close up, all without damaging anything along the way.
If you’re not comfortable digging into computer guts, forget the whole thing and just wait until you’re ready to buy a new computer.
That’s also my advice if you have a 486 PC, 60 to 75 MHz Pentium PC, or an old PowerMac, say one that’s four or more years old. There are so many other new elements in the latest PCs and Macs, and prices have fallen, that a processor upgrade won’t do enough.
If you have a more recent Mac, I’d look at new Mac prices seriously before thinking processor upgrade. There are just too few upgrades around, and they’re expensive.
If you have a 166 MHz or 200 MHz or faster Pentium with MMX, you’re too fast to get much from processor upgrades. Consider adding more RAM instead.
That leaves people with 75 MHz to 150 MHz Pentiums. If you already have 16 MB or more RAM in those, and especially if you use multimedia programs that have been designed to use MMX instructions, you could get some good bang by spending processor upgrade bucks.