Hi JT,

I would go for a faster hard drive and video card. Those were the two single best upgrades I made for performance on my E520. For hard drive, go with a 7200rpm drive with plenty of cache... this will signifigantly speed things up. You have Western Digitals now... if they are 7200rpm, you may have this factored in already. I found Samsung Spinpoints (HD502HJ) are great, and have 2 in my machine. They get 111Mb/s average reads using HD Tune.

As far as video, upgrade. Anything will be better than your 7300LE, and many options will not set you back that much. I run an ATI Radeon HD 4670 fanless in mine because its in my bedroom, but even with quiet being my main objective, that upgrade alone really added a lot of overall performance to my machine. A lot of folks go with NVIDIA 8800's here for their E520's... you may want to go that route if you are gaming at all.

As for the procesor upgrade, I recently picked up a Q6600 on craigslist for $90 (if it had not been so cheap, I would not have done it)... I had a E6600. I can't tell any noticeable difference aside from video encoding being about 20% faster. All other speeds are essentially the same as before the upgrade, and the extra 10-15 degrees of heat are simply not worth it. The temps are acceptable, but not great... and there is no aftermarket cooling options for the E520... you have to use the stock heatsink, becuase there are no holes on the board to moount anything else.

Hope this helps!
cantedview

Hey, Cheers for your comprehensive post!

I made some ground on all the bits and pieces, ended up picking up a Q6600 off ebay on the cheap, well worth it in my opinion. It has brought render times on my 3D work down by 50%!! Mine idles cooler than the stock E6600, at around 27 - 30. I used arctic silver 5 (pre prepped surfaces as per arctics instructions) Never seems to exceed 50degrees under heavy use. I bought a 3rd party cable to turn the stock 4pin3wire dell connector into a PWM fan connector but as the temps were so low ive not actually tested it to see if this adapter helps.

For the GPU i went with a XFX ATI HD 5570, it has a small fan but seems very quiet, has totally solved my video lag issues so im very happy. As far as im aware my drives are 7200< but i've not actually checked, so will look into that.

Found oiling my fan and having a good dust really helped silence the pc a bit.

I also upped my ram to 6gb, with the intention of possibly going to 8 if i fancy it anytime soon.

All in all i spent around £200 for CPU, GPU, RAM and thermal paste cpu cleaner etc. So all i all im very pleased as my pc should last a couple of years more now!

Cheers again for your reply, good to hear from someone who has also upgraded and e520

Josh.

Hello .. Looking to upgrade my 520 as well. Question for you guys..

CPU upgrade

I currently have the Intel® Core™ 2 E6420 Duo Processor(4MB L2 cache,2.13GHZ,1066FSB)

I found a used Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q6600 (8M Cache, 2.40 GHz, 1066 MHz FSB) for around $120 and think it may be worth my while. Is it hard to replace the CPU? Do I just pop it open and put a new one with some of that artic silver on it?

Graphics upgrade

I currently have the 256MB ATI Radeon X1300 Pro

I looked up the XFX ATI Radeon HD 5570 1 GB DDR2 VGA/DVI/HDMI PCI-Express Video Card HD557XZHF2 that you suggested and it is currently cheaper than my existing card on Amazon. Why is that?

Based on specs, the 5570 should be a significant upgrade. Would it be easy to install? Just pop it in and install the software?

Power Supply

Finally, I assume I will need to upgrade the stock power source from the stock 305W. Can you suggest one? Also, would a new power supply provide additional connectors for powering more slots? I have a 3rd hard drive that I would like to power besides the 2 built in and the 2 DVD drives.

Would 450W work?

http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-CMPSU-450VX-450-Watt-Certified-compatible/dp/tech-data/B000UF28V4/ref=de_a_smtd

Thanks for your help! Looking forward to a faster machine.