Can old PCs run Vista?

Posted at: Monday 14th May 2007 by David Fearon

How well can an aging PC handle Microsoft's shiny new operating system, and is it worth upgrading your old machine as far as it can go? David Fearon tinkers with an Athlon XP PC and a Socket 478 Pentium 4 PC to find out.

Many of you spend a lot of your hard-earned cash keeping up with state-of-the-art PC technology, but there are still plenty of people making do with machines that were once cutting-edge, but are now considered hugely outdated. In fact, in our most recent reader survey, we discovered that a healthy percentage of you still use an Athlon XP or Socket 478 Pentium 4 system.

So do these systems have any life left in them? Can they be given a shot in the arm to come up to modern standards, or should they be ditched wholesale? The motherboard of what was a mid/high-end Athlon XP or Pentium 4 system back in 2003/2004 can theoretically be upgraded to cope with very modern hardware. However, is it modern enough to cope with the extra demands of Windows Vista and still have enough power left to run games and applications?

We decided to find out if an old machine is able to run Vista well enough, and whether it can be upgraded to make Vista more than simply acceptable. Plus, can it run modern games under the new OS with the high frame rates and detail settings that CPC readers demand? To find the answers to these questions, we took an Athlon XP 2400+ and a 2.4GHz Pentium 4 system and upgraded them to the hilt.

What's changed since 2003?

The major limiting factor on a four-year-old PC is the motherboard's processor socket and chipset. Our AMD system uses a Socket A and Nvidia's nForce2 chipset, while the Intel system uses a Socket 478 and Intel's own 865PE chipset. AMD has revised its socket a few times, via Socket 754, 939 and AM2, while Intel has been more consistent; nonetheless, the LGA775 socket system that its new processors use is physically incompatible with Socket 478, even if the chipset wasn't. So, as far as CPUs are concerned, we're limited to upgrading to the fastest of these old-generation CPUs rather than opting for something featuring newer technology. In the case of the Socket A system, this means replacing the Athlon XP 2400+ with an XP 3200+, the final and fastest Socket A processor to be produced by AMD. For the Intel machine, it means pulling out the 2.4GHz Pentium 4 and popping in a 3.4GHz chip instead.

On the graphics front, matters look much rosier; instead of having to hunt down the top-end versions of several-year-old GPUs, you can buy new, nearly top-end cards. This is thanks to the wonder of the AGP 8x interface, which both our old AMD and Intel systems support. This was way ahead of its time, and has enough bandwidth to cope with modern GPUs. Our test systems varied quite a bit here; the Athlon machine had a GeForce 6800 GT card - a good mid-range card in its time - while our Pentium system, on the other hand, had a Radeon 9800XT card. Nonetheless, the presence of the AGP 8x slot on both machines means that we're able to upgrade the graphics to impressive levels. Not to an absolutely top-notch level, since there's no AGP version of Nvidia's 8800 series, but take a small step down into DirectX 9 territory and you can fit either an ATi Radeon X1950 Pro or an Nvidia GeForce 7800 GS. We decided to test using both cards to discover if one of them would win out when faced with the relatively unusual task of making itself at home in a four-year-old motherboard.