Computers Hardware What I Use
Apr 23, 2009
Luke
4 Comments

Dell Inspiron 530 – How Upgradable is it?

Dell Inspiron 530

I’ve had a Dell Inspiron 530 for just over a year now.  It was pretty good in the processor department when I purchased it but memory and graphics performance was mediocre.  Over the past year the system has seen a few upgrades.

The system started out having an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750, 2GB DDR-2 PC2-5300 RAM, a 250W PSU (YES! Just 250 watts!), 2x 320GB HDD, NVidia 8600GT 256MB GPU on a Foxconn G33-S motherboard all packed into a smallish case.

I’ve kept the case, motherboard, CPU and hard drives but the rest of the system has changed.

First thing to change was the PSU to a more substantial 650W one.  The next thing was the memory – I took out the 2 GB of slowish memory and changed it for 8GB of GeIL Black Dragon DDR2 running at 800Mhz with tight timings.  I then installed a 9800GT which I overclocked quite nicely to 9800GTX speeds.  The system was running well and I was happy with it for a month or so….  I then noticed a rather nice pre-overclocked Palit 4870 Sonic graphics card and I had to have it!

One thing to note about upgrading the graphics card on the Inspiron 530 is that the case is small and high end graphics cards tend to be big so it is a squeeze to say the least!  The Palit Sonic 4870 only just fits in the machine.  To get it into the case I had to remove one of the hard drives.  Saying this though, it is worth it!  The machine can now play all of the latest games at high settings at 1920×1200.

Another thing to note is for the Inspiron 530 to support 8GB of RAM (or in fact anything more than 4GB) you must have a recent version of the bios.  This can be downloaded from Dell and installed through Windows with ease.  Of course for your system to support more than around 3.5GB – 4GB of RAM you must also be running a 64bit operating system or be using a hack that allows 32 bit Windows to see more RAM.

If you have any questions about the system feel free to comment or contact me and I’ll be happy to help.

Share this:
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Linkedin Reddit Stumbleupon Tumblr Posterous Email

Related posts:

  • http://www.othersideboardsports.com/kiteboarding.html kitesurf

    That’s really weird!

    • http://www.lukeaddison.com 1uk3

      What’s so weird about it? Lol.

  • Mike

    Do you know if the system can support greater than8 GB of RAM

    • http://www.lukeaddison.com/ 1uk3

      Hi Mike, unfortunately the motherboard only has 4 slots for RAM. It only supports 4x 2GB sticks of DDR2 800 (or DDR2 of below this speed).

      If you're looking for something that supports more RAM you're going to need something like a Core i7 system. I've seen that a lot of them are supporting up 24GB of DDR3 RAM!

      Why would you want more than 8GB of RAM though? It's vary rarely that I manage to use it all. The only time I do is if I'm running multiple virtual machines.