CPU upgrade please help....

[Sheo5225]

Well, I have this computer and so far I have put in a good deal of money in RAM and a graphics card, next uyp is the CPU (which I have no idea how to replace like what I should buy or what I should put in, etc). Anyway the mother baord currently installed is a MSI MS-7366 1.0. Old huh? I have a GeForce Galaxy 210 1gig video card and 4 gigs of ram currently installed. Now the purpose of this is so I can run FFXIV much more smoothly and I am assuming the issue here is the CPU which is.. a screw it I need help, these are my specs..

more info:

Board: MS-7366 1.0
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. V3.5 06/28/2008

2.80 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4
16 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache
Hyper-threaded (2 total)

Windows 7 Ultimate (build 7600)
Install Language: English (United States)
System Locale: English (United States

3328 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory

Slot 'DIMM0' has 2048 MB
Slot 'DIMM1' has 2048 MB

NVIDIA GeForce 210 [Display adapter]
VIZ E370VL [Monitor] (37.0"vis, s/n QKHJAL2604527, June 2010)

here ya go, if anyone can recommend a good CPU for me that will be great, thanks.. oh and what I need must be equivalent or better than Intel Core 2 Duo (2.0 GHz) / AMD Athlon X2 (2.0 GHz) and if at all possible (this being the recommend spec..) can my computer use something like Intel Core i7 (2.66 GHz) or faster.. thank you in advanced

[Sheo5225]

This motherboard was once part of the HP Pavilion A813W.. I hope I can get some help..

[sheo5225]

oh damn, forget I mentioned that.. I forgot the motherboard was upgraded too..

[Guest]

How much can you spend?
This is basic but crucial...

BTW, could you get the 64 bit edition of W7, tha way you could use all of the 4gig of ram.

That is very important.

[Guest]

I can, but how does that work? dont I just plug in the ram and it reads it just fine or what?

[gshv]

Here are links to CPU support lists for MS-7366 motherboards:

http://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-MSI/P6NGM-L_%28MS-7366%29.html

http://www.cpu-upgrade.com/mb-MSI/P6NGM-FIH_%28MS-7366%29.html

Even though your board has the same MS-7366 number, there is no guarantee that it will support all of those processors. FFXIV is a multi-threaded game, so it's better to upgrade to quad-core processor. Before you do that take a look at your CPU and graphics card utilization. If your CPU is a bottleneck then definitely upgrade it, otherwise look at upgrading the graphics card.

Gennadiy