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Is it possible to swap out the motherboard and processor on my existing computer? I have an old Gateway computer with a 500 mhz Intel Pentium 3 processor and I want to upgrade it to a better processor. Either a Pentium 4 or an AMD Athlon 64. I know that in order to do this I will need to swap out my motherboard. Is it possible to swap out my motherboard and would this cause any problems with my computer?
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You should be able to, but older computer's may have hardware that is not cross platform which means it will only work on an intel board, or amd, not both. Your probably fine though...

If you buy a new board and processor, thats the majority of the cost of your pc, so you might as well go out and buy the ram (ddr2 is dirty cheap to make way for ddr3), a HDD (your old comp is probably IDE, which is slower than SATA, not to mention they are quite cheap as well) it doesnt sound to me like you'll be gaming or anything with this computer so an onboard video and sound card should do the trick.

You can keep your HDD ans transfer it over if you like, you can transfer over your drives and floppy (as long as the connections are available on your board, IE: enough ide/sata connections)

The only thing i'd buy (along with mobo, and processor) is new ram and a new case.

The athlon 64 is a good processor, I've got it running right now.

(Keep in mind you can go buy desktop computer's for pretty cheap now, and it'll be a full system, then you can atleast use your old one for thing's or even sell it.)

Can I take a motherboard from an older computer and use it in a newer computer? I have two crashed computers. One though that's way newer than the old one doesn't have a working video card in the motherboard. It stopped working. That other old crahed computer though has a working motherboard. Will I be able to use the old motherboard in that newer dell computer?
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market samurai ~ marketsamurai ~ marketsamurai.com

you can change mobo around
but
you may run into problems with some of the odd ass plugs that dell uses