Hi all, I am using an 18-month old Gateway 820GM Media Center computer. It has served me well and the 3.0ghz P4 processor is as much as I need for most applications. However the processor is the part of the machine that is now the constraint...I've upgraded the graphics and sound cards recently, and will soon invest in increased RAM. My question is how easy/difficult is it to upgrade the current P4 processor to a new dual-core processor? My question is more from a technical perspective...is an upgrade even possible with the hardware in the machine currently? The motherboard is called a 'Intel (South Lake) P4 Motherboard R0' by Gateway. It is a BTX form factor motherboard with an LGA775 socket and support for 800mhz and 533mhz system buses. Unfortunately this is greek to me. More information on the mobo can be found here: http://support.gateway.com/s/MOTHER... Any information you could supply would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

You can't upgrade to a dual core because you have a LGA-775 915 chipset motherboard which doesn't support dual core processors. So you are stuck with single core upgrades. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz 2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7900GT SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0+1 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

What applications are you running where the CPU is the constraint? Michael J

Media Center can be sluggish, especially if I'm using processor-intensive programs like Photoshop. Furthermore the processor is the constraint for an upgrade to Vista - all other components are well above the suggested requirements.

Gateway specifies the motherboard has a model number D915GSN, indeed a 915 series. My next question is does this motherboard support Pentium D chips? I assume Cobra's response above is referring to Core 2 chips, but I wonder if an upgrade to a legacy Intel Pentium D chip is possible.