Is this computer powerful enough?

I am now a college student and get Win7 free through Academic Alliance. I'm upgrading all the computers I can to it, to save people the money.

The computer in question is the following:

Dell Optiplex GX620

3.0GHz Hyper-Threaded Pentium 4 (model 531, LGA775)
2GB DDR2 RAM
Intel 82945G/GZ Express Chipset Family
40GB 7200RPM HDD (SATA 1.0)

I'm a little concerned about the CPU, but mostly about the graphics. Can this computer run Windows 7 as smoothly as Windows XP? Will it need any upgrades? She doesn't do any media-related work outside of Youtube watching, and basically uses it for Internet, Office and iTunes.


Thanks!

 

First, even with an old graphics chip, you can get run Win 7 with the eye-candy off and get an XP-style desktop which will work just as well as XP... so it's no reason to avoid upgrading. However, I think this chipset has the GMA 950 graphics chip, so in this case you should be able to use Windows 7's Aero desktop with nicer visuals.

For this usage, it'll be fine, as long as her music/video collection is under 10 gb or so... otherwise you could upgrade the hard drive or plug in an external drive.

 

The only thing i'd upgrade would be the HDD to something faster. HDD's are a bottleneck and the most noticeable for basic users. 2GB should be fine for basic use. Every 40GB HDD I've worked with has been frustratingly slow. A larger faster hard drive can be had for $50 and will make a nice improvement.

 

With an LGA775 CPU Socket, and a 945 Chipset, that is certainly upgradeable if you ever wanted to splurge on it. And goofball is correct. Upgrade that to a SATA II HDD, and you'll definitely notice it.

 

hmmm... if you can, download and run HD Tune on it... I'm curious about the drive speed.

 

Not always really that upgradable, there are different iterations of the chipset and motherboard setups. Not all can take C2D's. Earlier versions of the Asus P5LD2 could only take up to Pentium D's. Most of the GX620's we got at work only had the P4 3.8Ghz chip, no dual cores. Not sure if you're thinking a Pentium D would be a good upgrade for them? They have pretty lax cooling setups since these are optimized more for quieter office environments and not really for all-out performance.

Having used the GX620 extensively at work with the 80GB HDD's, I can say that the HDD's were very slow. We eventually did upgrade them to newer HDD's (only 160GB but single platter) and it made a very noticeable difference as opposed to the 2 platter setup of those older 80GB drives.

 

Almost any Pentium D would be better than a single core, 90nm, hot, Prescott core. The GX620 supports Pentium D's up into the 9xx series, with the latest BIOS update of course. That upgrade and a cheap new HDD would make it a solid baseline machine. Capable of good 720p video playback even. The desktop version of the 945 GMA950 runs at something like 400MHz which gives it decent video bandwidth.

 

ON HD Tune, the drive read slowly declines from 55MB/s to 30MB/s. I don't know if that's an indicator of a dying drive or just a slow one.


Min: 3.1MB/s
Max: 57.5MB/s
Avg: 44.0MB/s
Access Time: 12.7ms
Burst Rate: 157.3MB/s
CPU Usage: 6.1%

 

That's normal. The HDD read/write starts at the outer tracks where, for a fixed rotation speed, the linear velocity is higher. (Optical discs, on the other hand, start at the middle).

John

 

If Windows 7 will run on a netbook, it should run on that computer just fine. I had it installed on an old P4 2.8 with what I think was the original hard drive (wife's computer, just used for internet and Word mostly) before the motherboard quit working and I just decided to build her a brand new one from the ground up.