I currently have am 820 in the system. do you think it's worth it to upgrade to a 950? would it change the performance dramatically?

mbayabo

Either the Pentium D 950, or the D 945 should work in the Dimension 9100.

Prior to upgrading the processor, you need to upgrade the BIOS to to the latest version, A03, when support for newer processors was added.

The 9100 does not support any Intel Core 2 Duo, or Core 2 Quad processors.
                                         
The Core 2 Duo CPU, require a different motherboard, that's the reason for the Dell Dimension 9200 system.

Bev.

mbayabo

Yes, you would see some performance improvement, but the extra performance you will see, may not be worth the cost of the upgrade.

Bev.

I upgraded my D805 to a D925 and although the specs and features are better for the D925, I saw no difference in operation.

I upgraded by 9100 just a short while ago.

Was XP, I applied a BIOS upgrade, moved up to 4GB RAM (from 2GB), installed Win 7 64 bit and upgraded the CPU to a Pentium D 960 that cost me £56 on ebay.

OVerall performance upgrade was very significant, the new CPU is at least 20% faster than the old D840 and that element of the upgrade probably made the most difference.

CPU upgrade was v.easy, just look online for the Dell service documentation and follow it to the letter, take the opportunity while you have the case open to gie it a good hoover, clean out the fans etc (espec the one at the bottom by the SATA bays)

BIOS A03 shows

Fixes & Enhancements

1. Improve keyboard parser buffer operation.

2. Allow USB Controller to be disabled.

3. Improve support for bootable optical drives.

4. Add new Service Tag editing feature.

5. Add support for VIIV logos.

6. Add PCI and Sigmatel support for for Vista.

7. Update the Copyright to 2006.

8. Add support for newer processors.

9. Improve S3 operation.

10.Improve PME functionality.

11.Correct size reporting in setup.

12.Improve PCIE detection algorithm.

13.Correct USB detach performance.

14.Improve stability when no boot device is present.

I know this is old, but I have Dell 9100 with D820 processor, and BIOS A01. I tried to upgrade BIOS to A03 but get errors - I used "Run as Administrator" but get another error. I am using Windows 7, 64Bit.

Thanks, Matt

Antivirus programs and 64 bit versions of the os will have issues.

Do the update with a DOS diskette or install a hard drive with XP and update the bios.

Pentium D 900 series from 915 to 945 will work with the updated bios.

These cpu are required for 64 bit windows 10 upgrade.