Processors upgrade for ECS 945GCT-HM Livermore-GL6

[Ridgenew]

really!!! its really better to buy a new one then upgrading my desktop?

[Big_Dave]

You would have to weigh the costs and what you would end up with verses buying a replacement.  It's basically a price verses performance decision and what your needs require.

[Ridgenew]

Well the CPU cost me $160 and the video card is about $130.

I am not sure I am really confuse right now, and at the moment I can't really afford to spend over $500.:smileysad:

[Big_Dave]

If you already purchased the CPU and video card then continue on with your upgrades. 

[Ridgenew]

No no I haven't, I am still searching for the best option

[Big_Dave]

Have you looked over the new HP PCs?

[Ridgenew]

Wow they are cheap but the thing is I am kind of scare to buy a new HP because I bought my current desktop for $800 then after three years I can't upgrade to anything that is fast..

It just has so much limitations when upgrading..:smileysad:

To be totally honest seeing their cheap prices made me wonder toooo.

[erico]

HI,

This is the HP online store at HP Australia. Here are the new HP PC's  The other website was HP USA. and US$ not Aussie Dollars. That was why the prices seemed so low to you.

Best regards,

erico

[chris-tech]

I have a HP A6000Y that i bought in 2007.  It came with a P4 3.2GH HT, and 1GB of DDR2.  About a month ago I added an extra GB of ram.  Then the bottleneck was the processor.  I bought a core 2 duo e4300 on ebay for 39.99, it was used but it works great.  Just one example of performance increase:  My P4 took about 1.5 hours to encode a 2 hour movie into dvd format.   The C2D does it about half that. 

I literally popped the processor in yesterday.  it's wierd someone else is looking for the same thing.  The seller had 2 of them.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Intel-Core-2-Duo-CPU-Processor-E4300-1-80GHz-2Mb-800MHz-/110643349971?pt=CPUs&ha...

Thats the same guy I bought mine from and it works.

[Kealon]

Be what it is...FYI

The ECS 945GCT-HM Motherboard does have available BIOS Updates, however if you are already on Windows 7/8 you may need to search around for the compatible afuwin files for your respective x86 or x64 OS from a random vendor and then extract the executables from hp's BIOS exe's to get and rename the ROMS, ie liv8-5.25 to 525.ROM or use afudos and target the same file, then the whole 4xxx series becomes supported. 

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en&softwareitem=pv-66825-1

This 5.12 BIOS worked to boot too, however just overwrote with the more recent 5.25 since found it shortly thereafter:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareDownloadIndex?cc=us&lc=en&dlc=en&softwareitem=pv-49221-1

(replacing the PSU is probably recommendable at this late date from its manufacture - truth be told though this one is still on original 250W PSU w/ an HD 6670, though well maintained a 90%+ efficient ATX or picopsu will find its way in there soon enough)

If worried about worst case, there are forums that discuss how to recover by loading a BIOS from a thumbdrive though if you are patient and thorough, doubt it will be necessary. ie. make sure your computer is not tasked with any process other than the update by checking resource usage in task manager, when your PC is idle - run with administrator priviledges just to be safe, open the renamed bios file to where you downloaded, extracted and renamed it, check to reboot after completion in afuwin, accept the suggestions in afuwin's wizard and press flash... then stop pressing stuff...wait for it...done.