Currently I have: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ And I'm buying: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ --both Socket 939. I'm wondering if there's anything special I have to do besides drop the new CPU in--like in regards to voltage, "jumpers", BIOS settings and things. My motherboard is a: MSI RS482M4-FD/ ILD/ IL/ L Also, will the stock heat sink and fan that came with my 3200 suffice for the 4200? Thanks so much for the help.
Welcome to hardwareforums nullGumby :beer: It should work fine straight off (And the 4200 will most likely come with an identical stock cooler to the 3200) but if i was you i would be tempted to save up for a little longer so that i could get the AM2 version (skt 940) and a AM2 motherboard so that i could use DDR2 ram (Many times faster ) also, another upgrade that is worthwhile is SATA hard drives (btw the difference between SATA1 & SATA2 doesn't make any noticeable difference)
Impotence, Thanks for the reply... I should have mentioned the processor I'm getting is a "processor only" purchase. Also my mobo is a Socket 939 that's designed for AMD processors--it was kinda tough to find a 939 version as AM2 is the newer and better. I also have SATA, striped 160 GBs. I'll keep in mind your suggestions for future upgrading--thanks for the reply!
Well, dual-core chips do put out a bit more heat. You're going to jump from 67W to 89W of power output. I believe AMD bundles a beefier cooler with copper and heatpipes employed. You could swing it with the stock cooler, but I'd be very wary of it. My X2 3800+ puts out about as much heat as my 3700+ did when it was overclocked past 2.6GHz (from the stock 2.2). A cheap performance cooler would be the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro. It runs $20-30 online, so it's fairly reasonable for a high-performance cooler.
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Alright...Done! I got the new CPU in, and the new RAM--looks like everything's working fine. I saw that I have 2 GB of RAM, and in Process Explorer I see the two processor windows. SysInfo tells me AMD 4200+ Dual--just like it's suposed to. My first real test was running a Prime95 torture test for a few minutes...got the CPU up to 46 C and then stopped the test--but under normal usage it seems to be around 33 C. I still have yet to try some gaming or anything--but I'm just glad I didn't order the wrong parts or break something. Thanks again for everyone's help.
