HP Pro 3130 CPU Upgrade?

[StuffAZ]

I want to upgrade my CPU to the max possible.  I currently have a Pentium 2.8g G6950 Dual Core on the 2A9C 1.1 board with AMI 6.16 (3/18/11) BIOS.  This baby has been a work horse but I need faster and more cores to do the video editing I do.  Is it possible to upgrade the CPU with and i5 or i7?  Any other issues on the upgrade if possible.  Thank You in advance.

[SamirD]

Absolutely.  This system came available with i3s, i5s and i7s, so you basically can take your pick for what you need.

Higher frequency cpus like the i5-680 will provide a lot of speed that you can feel, while more cores and a lower frequency will be good for anything that can take more advantage of multiple cores versus raw single thread speed.

Be sure to check your heatsink to make sure it is the same tdp as your new processor, be sure to have the latest bios update before swapping processors, and I think this will be a cheap and easy upgrade that will breathe a lot of life in that that system of yours.  And the upgrade will be pretty cheap too--around $20-30 on ebay for a new i5 processor.

[SamirD]

I may have spoke too soon about an upgrade being that easy.  I recently purchased an i5-680 and installed it and no post.  The system turns on but never posts.  The i5-680 is shown to be an available processor on the Pro 3130, so I'm not sure what's going on here.  

I plan to put back the original i3-540 and start diagnosing from there.  Usually processor upgrades like this are dead simple when there was another version of the model with the processor available as a factory option.

[SamirD]

Original processor worked fine when put back in, so I checked the bios level.  There was a newer bios available which I didn't see earlier.  After upgrading the bios and putting in the i5-680, it worked perfectly.  Now, this system is almost as fast as the i5-2500 I have.  Once I add the gpu to this one I bet I won't be able to tell the difference.

Total invested in my 3130--$40 system + $25 i5-680 + $35 gpu = $100.  Not too bad for a capable system for daily use. 

And there's still even room to upgrade the power supply, memory, hard drive to ssd, and even faster gpu--which I will again be able to do on the cheap as prices drop.