HP d530 Processor Upgrade

[Windowsxpfan]

Hi, I'm volunteering at a High School and there's some HP d530's in the school. They're 11 years old. I just wanna try to squeeze the life out of them as much as I can. The d530's came with Pentium 4 Northwoods. I wonder if a early Prescott Pentium 4 with XD would work on a d530. I know the faster and newer ones would take up more heat. The school is getting money for new machines but I would like to squeeze the life out of the d530's and use them as student computers because the classrooms doesn't have enough student computers. I hope an early Prescott with XD would work and fit because I would like to run Windows 8. The d530's have the 800mhz front side bus. Helpful Answers would be Appericated. Please don't say Get a New PC.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

It is very hard to give you a 100% good answer.

Most of the time you get a microcode error.

If you do a search on this forum, most folks were unable to get a Prescott to work, and the max would have been the 3.4 GHz one.  I think the ones that were able to get the Prescott to work had the original BIOS installed.  Some then updated the BIOS and then got the microcode error.

A 100% foolproof upgrade is to install the Northwood Pentium 4 3.2/800/512 processor with the sSpec SL6WG.

http://ark.intel.com/products/27501/Intel-Pentium-4-Processor-supporting-HT-Technology-3_20-GHz-512K...

I installed that one on 4 d530's which came with the Northwood Pentium 4 2.66/533/512 processors.

That makes a nice improvement and adds hyperthreading to the mix without the extra heat generated by the Prescott processor.

I also got rid of the PC2700 memory and installed PC3200 memory to max out the memory speed to 400 MHz.

[gabornico]

I have a d530CMT with the following configuration

CPU: Pentium IV HT CPU 3,2 GHz/1M/800 (Prescott)

Heatsink: Scythe Samurai with a Delta AFB0912VHE fan

RAM: 4x1 GB PC3200 KTH-d530/1G RAM modules

GFX: Radeon HD3850 AGP

S-ATA DVD-RW

120 GB S-ATA SSD with XP Pro

HP Z400 475W power supply (the stock PSU is too weak)

I also tried the 3,4 GHz Prescott but unfortunately there is no microcode update.

You really need to replace the stock heatsink cause it's unable to keep the Prescott cool (even those Northwood chips can get pretty hot).

I hope this helps a bit