I bought a pretty low end emachines a few months back, mainly because I was broke, but have been slowly upgrading it since then. I have about 1.5GB of RAM now, good burners, card readers, hard drives, etc....

But the processor is still stock. It's one of those Celeron D 352's....And I'm looking to get something much better. I run lots of video processing programs, usually many programs at once, and the comp just can't handle it, at least not fast enough for me. This is where my dilemma comes in, I am a computer building idiot, I don't really know anything about sockets and ports. All I know is my motherboard is a 775 socket, but I'm worried about what the motherboard itself can handle. I don't want to get a good processor and not have it work because it's too good for the board. I opened my system up but couldn't see any serial numbers to look it up. It's a T3516 system.

I'm figuring it would be compatible with most other Intel CPU's just as long as their not the best-of-the best.
Any insight? And which processor should I go for? I'm looking for something between $175 - $250.

You may be able to find out your exact motherboard by contacting eMachines. Considering it's budget price, you may not have a stellar board. However, if you have a socket 775, than almost any socket 775 should work.

If your board supports FSB 800 you can get a Intel Core 2 duo processor for about 200 bucks. I would also suggest an upgraded video card the machine supports PCI-X. Video intense applications will bog down the main processor with onboard graphics. I went to the E-machine website and there is an e-mail adress as well as a phone number you can call to get more information on the computer.

OK, thanks, I will try and contact them about it.

I did some poking around their website before going ahead and emailing them, and it turns out they had my motherboard listed.

"Support for Intel processors in a LGA775 package
800/533 MHz front side bus support"

So I'm guessing it maxes out at 800MHz FSB, which I can take as good news...Intel has those for good prices. But the one last thing I'm concerned about before I go shopping for one is the cache size. The mother board stats make no mention of it, so I'm guessing it's just a self contained feature within the CPU itself. Would 2MB be ok for this board? Like you mentioned SneakyCyber, I'm going to get a Core 2 Duo, of which all 800 models seem to carry 2MB of cache.

And yes, my board has one empty PCI-Express slot. I will definitely look into a good card for that as well.

Before I become too much of a bother, what can I expect after all of this? I'm running on a cheap 3.2 GHz 533MHz 512KB Celeron D, with no real video card, just the built in Radeon Express 200. If I put about $450 between the two, should I really see a difference? I don't want to spend too much money...

You will notice a big improvement going from a celeron to a core 2 duo. Just make sure the FSB/socket matches and it should work. The L2 cache is built into the processor and motherboards don't have specific sizes it can handle, so you don't need to worry about that.

Also, a video card would help a lot. You probably don't need some 300$ card, but something in maybe the $110-150 prices range will increase performance greatly.

OK, great. I was double checking just to be sure and it seems that core 2 duos run on current ATI Radeon Xpress 200 sets.

Intel's Core 2 Duo E4400 looks to be the best I can go for with the 800MHz FSB limit. Guess I'll go for that.

Please be advised that not all motherboards with a socket 775 will support a Core 2 Duo.

Yeah, turns out that's the case with what I have. The ATI Radeon Xpress 200 DOES NOT except Core 2 Duo's, of any kind. I ended up going to a Tiger Direct store to ask about this. The boards maxes at a Pentium D, and it just didn't seem worth it to me. I ended up buying a new computer from the ground up. I haven't got it all together yet (some of those little I/O panel connections are confusing for a first timer), ...the fan included with the cpu didn't fit the board and the fan I bought didn't have any thermal compound on it :/ So now I'm waiting for that in the mail.

I ended up getting a Core 2 Duo E6600.

Just curious what did you end up getting.. Aside from the Core 2 duo E6600

I think I got a pretty good machine...took me three days to biuld, my first one, but it's running great now.

P5N-E SLI motherboard, seems to get the job done
320B HDD
LG Multi-Writer with Lightscribe
Two 160GB Western Digital Externals (backup)
4GB DDR2 RAM
eGeForce 7600GS Card (these things confuse me with the exremely similar numbering & naming, so I just got one that was around $100 and PCI-E)
Some of that Arctic Paste for the fan I bought seperately.

Overall, the performace difference was night & day. The old eMachines took about 40 minutes to encode a 43 minute episode into iPod format, now it takes about 4 minutes

Oh nonononono no! The 7600 GS is complete crap. You should return it and get at least a 7600 GT, preferably a 7900 GS. $100 for a $7600 GS is a ripoff.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Se...&CatId=1560

P5N-E SLI? I am now on my 3rd one! They can be extremely temperamental with memory, especially with regard to rebooting. Have you had problems? After a lot of tinkering mine is fairly stable now and am running my E6600 at 3.0Ghz. Don't know if you will be overclocking this rig but they will go miles faster than stock There is a massive forum dedicated to this board over at Asus if you are interested or I can try and answer any questions you may have..