A few weeks ago I happened upon Dell’s support manual for the Dell Dimension E510. I was doing a little investigative research to check out how much RAM they supported and scratched my head when I saw that they supported 8 GB of RAM. How could this be? My Dell Dimension E520 only supports 4 GB, or at least that’s what the Dell manual states.
After a little more investigation, and looking at Intel’s G965 Express Chipset tech documents, it appears that Dell’s documentation is lacking as the chipset will support 8 GB of RAM and will support various quad core processors as well.
So what did I do? I upgraded from my Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo Dual Core 2.13 GHz Processor to an Intel Q6600 Core 2 Duo Quad Core 2.4 GHz Processor. Oh, and for kicks, I upgraded from 4 GB of RAM to 8 GB of RAM and installed Windows Server 2008 x64 Standard Edition as the core operating system. Needless to say, it’s screaming.
What’s next on the shopping list? Samsung SpinPoint F1 750 GB 32 MB Cache SATA II hard drives… it’s time to ramp up the space that’s available to work with Virtual Machines.
Where does these lead me? Basically it provides a decent platform to be able to actual do some real testing and code development for a few different things that have been mulling around in the back of my head for the past few months.
We’ll see how this ends up working out… I think I might prolong procurement of any Mac products for the foreseeable future.
The Tech Blog of Dan Usher 
0 replies on “Q6600 Upgrade and RAM… lots of RAM…”
Never cared much for the Samsung hard drives. Had a 2.5″ Samsung that crashed with no warning the other day as well..
I’d go for a WD Black Series, or a WD Velociraptor instead.
Do you run 2k8 as a workstation? Check http://www.win2008workstation.com
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Anders, ahhh, these are 3.5″ drives… I agree that the 2.5″s are susceptible to hardware problems.
As for the WD Black or Velociraptor… I would but I’m uncertain as to if a Dell box can handle one – something to investigate I suppose.
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