XPS 420 CPU Support

Hello Jackattak,

The XPS 420 will support only 65nm chips, such as the Core 2 Duo and the  Core 2 Quad, but will not support the Core i7 or the Core 2 Quad 9*** series.  You will need to check the Core 2 Quad 6600 (which is on sale as it has been discontinued by Intel).  You can go to the XPS Club forum and look at the XPS 420 specs page.  I have two 420's and am running the Q6600 in both.

Best,

Darrell WV

Hi Darrell,

Thanks for the tip.  I don't have any need for Quad Core in my system as I rarely find myself ripping music, playing Crysis, encoding audio on a film, and burning CD's all at the same time.  :) 

All jokes aside, quad core is a bit much for me.  I'd rather have two cores at 3.0GHz than four cores at 2.66GHz.

After taking a look at some of the newer options out there for the XPS 420, it looked as thought the fastest upgrade would be the Intel 8600 at 3.33GHz, but that's still ridiculously expensive at $260+.  I think I'll wait a bit longer for those chips to come down before taking the plunge into higher CPU frequencies.  The additional cache will definitely help out as well.

I think the fastest and cheapest upgrade I can do at the moment would be RAID0'ing my OS drives.  With hard disk prices falling so quickly I can get a 320GB HD to match my OS drive and have 640GB of RAIDed performance.

Deleted.