I recently bought a secondhand Albacomp Aptiva with minimal information except that it worked (and it was cheap). The motherboard is a Foxconn 845GV4MR-ES which appears to be a good make and I'm looking to upgrade the CPU. According to Foxconn's (very limited) website, this board is socket 478 with 400/533 FSB and the best CPU I can put in there is a pentium 3.06Ghz. I checked on Intel's website and it's true; no newer CPUs have been made that will work in my board.
Now for the crunch factor, the price. I can get a 2.8GHz pentium for a quarter the price of a 3.06 but the 3.06 has hyperthreading. Now my understanding is that a hyperthreading CPU presents the operating system (XP SP2 in my case) with a second, virtual CPU. This should make things happen faster but by how much? I would guess that it won't be twice as fast because there's still only one physical CPU in there. Can anybody give me a rough idea of the speed advantage of the 3.06 over the 2.8? I'll be using it mostly for video processing and DVD authoring.
On a slightly different subject, I read something like this on another forum: "Why in God's name would anybody want to buy a secondhand processor?" That was from a forum administrator. Is this good advice or just scaremongering from somebody with an interest in selling new ones?
Now for the crunch factor, the price. I can get a 2.8GHz pentium for a quarter the price of a 3.06 but the 3.06 has hyperthreading. Now my understanding is that a hyperthreading CPU presents the operating system (XP SP2 in my case) with a second, virtual CPU. This should make things happen faster but by how much? I would guess that it won't be twice as fast because there's still only one physical CPU in there. Can anybody give me a rough idea of the speed advantage of the 3.06 over the 2.8? I'll be using it mostly for video processing and DVD authoring.
On a slightly different subject, I read something like this on another forum: "Why in God's name would anybody want to buy a secondhand processor?" That was from a forum administrator. Is this good advice or just scaremongering from somebody with an interest in selling new ones?