Processor swap on Acer Aspire AM3910 E3512

Hawk62

Hi all.New to the site,so if i posted in wrong category,my bad.Have this older Aspire AM3910.It runs great with the i3 550 cpu.See a guy online selling a i5 4440 for $50. I'm not a computer guru,but from what i've read,this i5 should swap in.I was planning on trying After Effects,etc. Would i see a noticeable rise in performance,or should i just leave it alone? I only have 6 gigs of ram,so i could double it.Any opinions on this? Thanks in advance.

AnhEZ28

https://www.userbenchmark.com/System/Acer-Aspire-M3910/2629 
This is a list of 1st Intel CPU that you can upgrade.

ttttt

@Hawk62

The biggest performance increase is swapping a spinning HDD to a Solid State Drive. Generally can expect 300% performance increase. Looks like you cannot upgrade your AM3910 to i5-4440. Even if it works, you can only expect a 108% performance increase. A 500 GB 2.5" SATA3 SSD is around $50 nowadays.

For the methods on how to swap to a SSD, read more posts here about the topic.

Hawk62

Thanks to both of you for the replies.With a 300% increase with a SSD,i know i'll be going that route.

StevenGen

Hawk62 said:

Hi all.New to the site,so if i posted in wrong category,my bad.Have this older Aspire AM3910.It runs great with the i3 550 cpu.See a guy online selling a i5 4440 for $50. I'm not a computer guru,but from what i've read,this i5 should swap in.I was planning on trying After Effects,etc. Would i see a noticeable rise in performance,or should i just leave it alone? I only have 6 gigs of ram,so i could double it.Any opinions on this? Thanks in advance.

Just to add to the potential updates of your Aspire M3910 desktop, the motherboard (which is the MB Kit aSampras EIH57MK for M3 Intel H57 Realtek RTL8111E Giga LAN ATX W/O 1394 LF w/i D-Sub+HDMI port) supports a CPU Socket Type 1156 and as your OEM CPU is the i5-550 the max CPU type that your motherboard and chipset can accept as suggested by Acer is the "Intel Core i7 870 LGA 2.93G 8M 1333 1156 95W B-1 Quad Core" only, the i5-4440 is not supported by the motherboard and chipset of the Intel H57 (click on the link left to see the H57 chipsets CPU compatibilities) your desktop supports a Maximum System Memory  of 16GB spread equally into its 4x slots e.g. slot 1 to 4 with 4GB per slot of DDRI3-1066MHz or DDR3-1333MHz, 1.5V 240pin memory modules, also and if you intend to upgrade this desktop (as its pretty old but not restrictive to run Win-10) make sure that you are running the last bios update available that is the vP01.A4 dated 2011/05/16. 

The Aspire M3910 desktop needs to be upgraded across the board and not just with an SSD as you will not get the full performance out of its system, updating just the SSD will not give you a 300% increase in performance as this systems HDD SATA bus is restricted to a max of SATA2 at 3Gb/sec and putting a new SSD of type SATA3 at max bus speed of 6GB/sec will restrict its performance to 3GB/sec. Make sure that you put a SATA2 type SSD and upgrade this system overall e.g. CPU, RAM, GPU and an appropriate GPU from its OEM the GF 340 toat least a GT440 or even up to a GeForce GT 630M card.

ttttt

@Hawk62

If your PC is still using SATA2 , then it is already very old, can only expect 150%+ increase in performance from SSD only. The  remaining life of the PC may not be very long. 

How about getting an entry level PC now at little above $400. This will give 10th generation CPU ( nothing lower than i3-10100), PCIe 3.0 motherboard, on board graphics, 8 GB RAM , 256 GB M.2 NVMe SSD.

Speaking of M.2 NVMe SSD.   A x4(using 4 lanes) PCIe 3.0  M.2 NVMe SSD is even 500%+ faster than SATA3 SSD, or say 2,000%+ faster than spinning HDD.

Everything is faster than your old PC, like the speed of a car comparing to walking. You will appreciate the performance of the new PC, assuming that your budget allows.