I have an eMachine W3503 (given to me by my mother) and I'd like to upgrade it on a budget.
Is it possible to add a better video card and more memory? What other upgrades are possible? If I can add stuff, what kind of memory does it take?
Posted by MattP (Member # 10495) on :
According to Google, it looks like you can upgrade the graphics card and memory. Supposing it's a standard-ish PC, you should also be able to upgrade the optical drive and hard drive. Googling "W3503 memory" will turn up several vendors from which you can purchase memory or just find out the type.
Posted by rollainm (Member # 8318) on :
Upgrading ram (up to 2x1Gb) should be painless and cheap. You need PC3200 184-pin DDR SDRAM.
It appears you have two internal hard drive slots (IDE not SATA), so any 3.5" IDE drive should do.
You have two 5.25" external slots for optical drives. Not sure what you might have free as of now, but any standard internal optical drive should do.
It seems you have a free PCI Express x16 slot, which is great, but I don't know what the wattage of the psu is, and that will restrict your video card options considerably I'm sure.
You have one standard PCI slot that is probably occupied by a modem. If you have cable or dsl you can ditch that and upgrade with a sound card, tv tuner, or whatever.
As for your processor, if you want to get adventurous, in theory your chipset supports P4 with hyperthreading and Pentium D (Intel's first dual core processors). But I'm not sure I'd risk it on an eMachine unless you just really want to.
Posted by Tstorm (Member # 1871) on :
Good advice so far. I'd avoid the CPU upgrade; for power and heat reasons. Especially avoid the Pentium D. That thing's a flamethrower, and I can barely keep mine cool in a custom system.
Posted by Nighthawk (Member # 4176) on :
Seems like research has been done, but anyway...
I don't know about modern day eMachines, but the ones from a few years back could be upgraded. My father had one.
If the machine has an integrated video board, usually there's a way to disable the on board video in favor of a new graphics card. But you won't be able to get "high end" video cards, if that was your goal.
Switching CPUs is risky on these machines because of jumper settings, power options and heat considerations that aren't simply documented. Also, for the record, that will most probably void your warranty.
Posted by Jon Boy (Member # 4284) on :
quote:Originally posted by Nighthawk: But you won't be able to get "high end" video cards, if that was your goal.
Why not? If it's got a PCI-E slot, then it should be able to take a top-of-the-line card. Of course, the power supply might need to be upgraded to handle it, and the CPU would almost certainly be a bottleneck at that point.
My friend has an eMachines that he got for free from someone, and he replaced the power supply and put a GeForce 7800GTX in it, which at the top was a top-of-the-line card.
Posted by Boon (Member # 4646) on :
So, to make this 'puter good for games for a couple more years, what would you do, in what order, and how much would it cost?
Separate question, if you only had $200-300 to work with, what would you do with it?
Speak to me like a total computer un-savvy person (since that's what I am). Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
What sort of games?
Also, you can probably get a big boost of performance just by turning off all your startup programs.
Posted by Boris (Member # 6935) on :
Double your RAM, buy a new video card. You'll probably be okay with a mid-range nVida 7xxx and 8xxx series or ATI X1xxx X2xxx series cards. A Celeron isn't *ideal* for gaming, but it isn't the first thing you'll want to upgrade on a stock eMachine to do low-mid graphic quality gaming. Of course, before you make the video card Purchase, make sure you can actually add a video card.
If so, you'll be maxed out at 1GB of RAM without removing and replacing the RAM that is already in there. 1GB is sufficient for average gaming and general use, and RAM is pretty cheap lately. A 512 meg stick of DDR-400 (AKA PC3200 as was mentioned earlier) will run about 25 bucks plus shipping. That's actually a very good start. For Hard Drive, you should be able to survive for quite a while on 160gb of space, assuming you don't want a secondary drive for storing music, movies, or whatever. For video, like I said, you should be okay with the mid-range stuff. Without bottlenecking the crap out of your CPU, you can probably handle about a 100 dollar video card without wasting money or requiring a CPU upgrade.
Basically, as long as eMachines hasn't changed much since I was spending a lot of time working around them (the unfortunate time spent working in a Walmart electronics department) you should be able to upgrade just about anything in it without running into a major problem. As was mentioned, you may run into power consumption issues if you upgrade too far, but as long as you just stick to the basics you should be in pretty good shape.
edit to add: As for being good for the next couple years...that might be a little tough without a complete overhaul (Replacing motherboard, CPU, etc). Of course, that depends on whether or not you're willing to play games on the absolute lowest quality setting. And if you're planning to upgrade to Vista on this machine (which may be required for new games within the next couple years).
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
If I only had $200-$300 to upgrade a computer for gaming, and I didn't need to upgrade my computer for anything else, I would buy an Xbox360 or Wii.
Posted by Jon Boy (Member # 4284) on :
After looking at your system's specs and doing a little shopping around, I'd say it's probably not worth it to upgrade the CPU. It's just about the fastest Celeron there is, and the upgrade options are pretty limited and, in my opinion, not really worth the money. So I'd focus on RAM and the video card. Frankly, just about any video card you put in there will be a pretty significant step up.
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