Is a MB/CPU Upgrade worth it?

Currently have :

E210882 Motherboard

Core 2 celeron 6390

2x 1gb ram

4x2tb drives

2x 3tb drives

Dynex 400w psu

I can get the following for $110 from Newegg as a combo. (I'm too out of practice to know what goes together these days)

AMD A6-5400K 3.6GHz Dual Core,

Asus A68HM-K FM2+ mATX Motherboard,

G.Skill 8GB 1600 RAM

All I use this for is Plex and backups from our PC's. Running current UnRAID. Would there be any significant improvement by upgrading like this? What improvement?

What about just upgrading to 4 Gigs of RAM, any use there?

Thanks all in advance for the time.

Aaron

A Celeron 6390 dosn't exist... 

The A6-5400K is a slow CPU - only 2300 Passmark Points.

If you dont transcode in Plex, it migth be ok.

This CPU can transcode 1 Stream with 1080p.

Comparison: A Core i3-4130 makes 5100 Passmark Points and can handle 2x 1080p or 3x 720p transcoded.

RAM: 4GB is worth it 

As noted above, the model # you gave for your Celeron doesn't match anything Intel has produced.  The motherboard you indicated is a Socket 775 motherboard, so I presume you have a Celeron E1200/1400/1500/1600 CPU => these have a range of performance between 861 and 1260 on PassMark.

An A6-5400k, at 2138 PassMarks, should at least double your performance.  This is fine for "Plex and backups from our PC's" as long as you're not doing more than one transcode at a time with Plex ... but if you're going to upgrade, you may want to spend a bit more and get a bit more "horsepower".

Bumping your memory up is definitely a good idea => even if you don't do any other upgrades, that would be a nice improvement, especially for Plex.

Appreciate the info so far. Best I can tell what I wrote for the CPU is what UnRAID reported. Either way, pretty sure it's a Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Conroe Dual-Core 2.13 GHz. So it's around 1200 passmarks. I'll do some pondering and see what I can come up with.

An E6400 is not a Celeron ... it's a Core 2 Duo; but at 1296 PassMarks it's in the same range I noted above.

Bottom line is simple ...

=>  You can double your performance and quadruple your memory for $110 ... that's certainly worth it.

=>  If you want to better "future proof" the system, you may want to bump up to a CPU with even more performance (at least 4000 PassMarks) ... but this will cost at least double what you're looking at.

=>  If you're reasonably happy with your current performance, the $110 combo will be PLENTY of boost for your system.  If you're thinking of doing more -- e.g. additional Dockers or VMs -- then I'd do a more significant upgrade.

I upgraded my Core 2 Duo E6400 to a Core 2 Quad from eBay.  It's an inexpensive and very nice boost in performance and looks like an option for you - check your motherboard compatibility for C2Q models that will work (Q6600 will, I think).  You'll probably want to upgrade memory as well, though - and DDR2 is unreasonably expensive compared to DDR3/4.

That said, even though I love to keep old hardware running - you'd be better off upgrading to a modern Haswell or Skylake Core i3 than putting money into old LGA775 hardware.  If you want to keep going with your older system there are plenty of us who will offer advice - but just to be honest keeping an old computer running is like keeping an old car running, you'd better do it because you love it otherwise it's a pain and not that cost effective.

Agree -- if your BIOS supports the Core 2 Quad CPU's you could upgrade the CPU and add memory for well under $100.

A Core 2 Q6600 on ebay is ~ $20-25 ... and scores 2981 on PassMark.    8GB of DDR2 memory (a pair of 4GB modules) costs ~ $30 ==> so for a total of around $50-60 you could upgrade your current system to a better performance level than the upgrade you're looking at.

Wow, DDR2 has come down a lot since I last bought it - it was trending up at the time.  I paid over $30 a stick for 2GB modules a couple of years ago.  That's another one of the things to watch out for with older systems, by the way.  My motherboard is only capable of taking 2GB modules so I had to load it up with 4 sticks to get to 8GB of RAM (and populating all 4 banks isn't ideal).

... I paid over $30 a stick for 2GB modules a couple of years ago.

$30 for 2GB isn't exactly expensive.  The first "large" memory card I bought was a 8KB (Yes, that's "K" bytes) card for $1200 ... for my Altair in ~ 1975.  And that was a savings of nearly $300 because I bought it in kit form, so I soldered all the sockets and other parts to the motherboard and installed all the memory chips myself.  :)

Heh, you're a lot braver than I was.  When I upgraded my 512k "fat mac" to 2MB I had another guy do the soldering - I couldn't bring myself to take a soldering iron to a working motherboard (though I've tried to repair a couple of shorts).  That thing was a monster compared to the Radio Shack 4k and 16k TRS80's I'd worked on before, though.

The Altair was long before Apple products or TRS-80's, etc.  Those came several years later (and were a LOT cheaper than the earlier systems).    Memory in S-100 machines wasn't on the motherboard -- the memory card was a full-size S-100 board that had a LOT of parts on it -- all of the memory was individually socketed, and you had to solder all the sockets, as well as all the supporting chips, capacitors, resistors, etc.    This was long before chipsets on an IC days.