hi everyone, im also rebuilding a dell 4700 for a entertainment storage to hook up to my wide screen tv.
im new at this, i had the 4700 laying round the house for about 5 years gathering dust so i thought why not try to get it up and running for entertainment purposes and it would not cost me much if i stuff it as it was laying around doing anything anyways
I've already upgraded the ram to 4gb but as its a 32bit system, only can pick up 3.25gb and ive also installed Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit, and everything works well
as im new learn as i go, i only started about two weeks ago searching the net and tons of forums including this one to try to understand how PC's work internally
my main question is could someone show me a step by step instructions or even to a link on how to update the bios as ive been reading you have to be very careful or you can stuff the motherboard, my bios is A06 atm and from what ive read A10 BIOS was the last update
im thinking of updating the P4 processor as well from the original 530 to maybe a 650, for about $10 on ebay that will not brake the bank, would by any chance any of the Extreme Edition Pentium 4's work? maybe a SL7GD (M0) or SL7RR (M0) or SL7NF (M0) and last one SL7RT (M0)
im going to upgrade the powersupply to a 750w and the hard drive from 80gb to 1tb and get a 256gb SSD for secondary drive
plus im planing on getting a new ATI Radeon HD5450 DDR3 2GB 64bit PCI-E VGA DVI HDMI Graphics Card
anything else i can do to upgrade the 4700 which is in a dell 4550 case for more space and easier access
what would be the best heatsink paste to use? ive been told Arctic Silver paste is good?
also can i use the heatsink from a 4700C? reason i ask this is because these had a fan on these which i would bolt a after market fan in it
here are the specs of the system
Operating System
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit
CPU
Intel Pentium 4 530
Prescott 90nm Technology
RAM
4.00GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 266MHz (4-4-4-12)
Motherboard
Dell Inc. 0M3918 (Microprocessor)
Graphics
LCDTV14 (1360x768@60Hz)
128MB ATI Radeon X300/X550/X1050 Series (ATI)
ATI Radeon X300/X550/X1050 Series Secondary (ATI)
CrossFire Disabled
Hard Drives
77GB Hitachi HDS728080PLA380 ATA Device (SATA) 39 °C
Optical Drives
No optical disk drives detected
Audio
SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio
thanks in advance for your infomation