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Dell Dimension E521 RAM upgrade
Hey fellow Dell people,
I'm trying to upgrade my ram from 2gb to at least a 16gb max 32gb. I know it can done because I've seen it before.
The only thing is as of this moment I'm running on everything stock, os, ram, motherboard, etc. If i upgrade to a 16gb ram, will i need to upgrade the power supply, motherboard and cooling system? I'm trying to upgrade to windows 7 professional so i can do art, music and gaming like minecraft, gta and stuff like that. But i have a Windows vista 32bit (dear god the horror) I was also looking at 4gb x 4 ram for the upgrade and saw it was a little shorter than my stock ram chip set. Will it matter? Heat is obviously going to build up so I'm going to have to install a better cooling system. I was thinking about water cooling (Not the one were it's entirely submerged in de - ionized water or mineral oil) Basically the one were the water travels thru tubes and thru a small radiator mounted right above the ram set or video card or w/e. But in addition to all these upgrades I will need a bigger power supply, ALSO will the mother board be able to handle all of this??? IN ADDITION TO ALL OF THIS lol what else will I need to do?
I love Dell, they're like Volkswagen, Built like tanks but if one thing goes wrong it creates a whole new world of "damn it's time to bury my wallet".
So dell community, what do i need to do and how do I do it correctly?
rdunnill
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January 24th, 2014 19:00
If you want to build a gaming machine, I suggest an Alienware. The E521 can be upgraded to some extent, but it's a dated design. The maximum RAM is more likely four or eight gigabytes (of expensive DDR2) rather than sixteen, and the cooling is proprietary.
Philip_Yip
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January 24th, 2014 20:00
The best upgrades you are going to get for a E521 is a SSD and maybe a newer graphics card. You can install a 128-256 GB SSD to install Windows on and a 1 TB conventional hard drive for additional storage.
Crucial is a good place to look for both the SSD upgrade and the RAM upgrade:
http://www.crucial.com/upgrade/Dell-memory/Dimension+%2f+Dimension+XPS/Dimension+E521-upgrades.html
Occasionally the system will accept more RAM than Dell/Crucial state. The E521 has been tested by some users with 8 GB:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/desktop/f/3514/t/19267596.aspx
For Windows 7 64 Bit the system should handle it fine. Refer to Windows Reinstallation Guide and Unofficial Driver sets for more details:
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/
http://dellwindowsreinstallationguide.com/driver-sets/dimension-desktops/
Tally up the cost of the components you are going to buy as you might find that a newer low end Inspiron Desktop will have superior hardware than your E521 with the hardware upgrades.