Desktop upgrade

Lynton

Lynton

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Lynton (yes really!)
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Ok...

My now 5 yr or so old PC struggles........

I need to upgrade it..........

My knowledge of hardware is zilch, and many of you could buy components and build yourself, but I wouldn't have a clue.

I do know the following...

It needs to have a lot of RAM 8Gb (or more) preferably, therefore, Win7 64bit.

I have no idea between an AMD whatever, or an i3, i5, i7...



Looking for some advice for a good combination of memory and CPU...

I suppose the camera analogy is no point having a 5dIII with a kit lens or a 1000d with a 600mf4.

Budget for the desktop only, no peripherals about £600
 
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in exact same position but probably less budget.... not too bothered about HD.. but same as you otherwise.. built in card reader and usb 3 would be nice...
 
If you really have no idea i would suggest the best idea for you is to pop down to your local one man band type computer shop and ask him to build a purpose built one. For £600 you should get something quite good. You could take their quote and go elsewhere and start a little bidding to get the best price. They will try and tell you that certain components are different but its just a ploy to get out of giving you a better price, they can get any components needeYou can offer them some of your comp to reduce costs e.g. cd writer tower etc

Alternativly you can get on youtube and start learning but be careful there are certain limits different boards have, it can get quite complex
 
yeah i too am not fussed about HD........

USB 3 would be nice not essential... card reader - well everything has an SD slot nowadays... so not fussed about CF and all that malarky...:)

Looking on ebuyer and nothing jumps out...
 
tony09uk said:
If you really have no idea i would suggest the best idea for you is to pop down to your local one man band type computer shop and ask him to build a purpose built one. For £600 you should get something quite good. You could take their quote and go elsewhere and start a little bidding to get the best price. They will try and tell you that certain components are different but its just a ploy to get out of giving you a better price, they can get any components needeYou can offer them some of your comp to reduce costs e.g. cd writer tower etc

Alternativly you can get on youtube and start learning but be careful there are certain limits different boards have, it can get quite complex
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Exactly, if i knew difference between i3, i5, i7 etc...
 
I have no intention of gaming whatsoever...... but will have a look into it though (the pc that is, not gaming!!)

Thanks for the link.

Given already have 3Gb and it struggles, I am looking for at least 8, which will mean W64
 
I don't think memory is your issue.
What is your current spec and problems ?

P.S. The link I send you is with 8gb and win 7 home premium 64bit
 
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Don't get bogged down in technical specs., I'd have a look at the Dell website and go for a mid range box. You can always specify more RAM as needed. Whatever you do don't spend a fortune it's just not worth it.


I used to build them for myself, top end kit, fast! And you'd turn round three or four years later and find that it was totally outperformed by entry to mid level kit at a fraction of the price it took to build it. Nowadays I'll spend maybe £400 - £500 max on just the box and be prepared to chuck it in the nearest skip four years later.


I always use a decent quality separate monitor, but they last for years. Peripheral kit like keyboards, mice speakers etc are immaterial really and you can pick and chose and change them anytime. The box is the main thing, and you'll be surprised at the difference if you're comparing a new one with something five years old.


Just my thought anyway, hope it helps a bit.


cheers
 
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This has popped up a few times and generally it's said that the best option for your money at the moment is an i5-2500 with at least 8gb memory and a ssd as boot and program drive.
 
Yup. i5-2400 or i5-2500 (depending on price) + 8GBytes and 64bit Windows. You're unlikely to find a pre-built at a reasonable price with an SSD pre-installed, but it is relatively easy to do yourself (especially if you do it before you start using the machine so have a re-install needed). It also helps to have the OS media too if you can get it (dell charge £5 for it - well worth it IMHO).

Put simply, Intels second gen processors (i.e. those with iX-2xxx style names are split as follows):
  • i3: 2 real cores, both hyperthreaded (Win sees 4 "cores")
  • i5: 4 real cores (Win sees 4 cores)
  • i7: 4 real cores all hyperthreaded (Win sees 8 "cores")

Hyperthreading is explained in detail here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading but you're a reasonable amount better off with a real core rather than a hyperthreaded core, so clock for clock, the i5 is quite a bit better than the i3. The i7 is a little better than the i5. Programs like Photoshop/Lightroom can make use of all the cores, hence why it is recommended.

Second is clock speed. This is indicated by the 3 digits after the 2. An i5-2300 is slower than an i5-2400 (by a couple of hundred MHz) but this only applies within the iX line (i.e. an i3-2130 is clocked at a higher speed than an i5-2400).

You might be able to find a machine with onboard graphics as the iX processors have a graphics processor inbuilt. This will be absolutely fine for photography work.
 
I'd run some virus and spy ware scanners on it first just to make sure it isn't bogged down by something else. Also defrag the hardrive if that is still an option within windows and necessary. That used to make quite a difference in the old days.

If you run Firefox then that is a cpu hogging b****r! Try Chrome or opera and see whether it seems better.

Definitely no point spending a lot as it's just superseded and out performed in no time.
 
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For those saying virus scanner etc.. It's a 5 year old PC. It is in need of an upgrade.... 5 years is a LONG TIME in the computer world.
 
arad85 said:
For those saying virus scanner etc.. It's a 5 year old PC. It is in need of an upgrade.... 5 years is a LONG TIME in the computer world.
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Depends on the spec , I still have a 5 year old Core 2 Quad at 2.4Ghz with 8GB ram and it runs everything perfectly fine.
 
My dad still has the same machine he bought in 97. It runs just as well because he's never updated/changed a thing!! It doesn't go on the internet so it hasn't picked up anything nasty.

My ibook is 9. That still works the same as it always did.

I'd also whip the case off and give the dust a good blow out to rule out slowing down due to over heating or over heating prevention.
 
nikolarun said:
Depends on the spec , I still have a 5 year old Core 2 Quad at 2.4Ghz with 8GB ram and it runs everything perfectly fine.
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It's still a 5 year old PC. A new one will be significantly faster (I ran a 3 year old C2D 3GHz machine with 8G until I upgraded to this i7-2600 and I thought it was "perfectly fine" until I started processing 5D2 RAW images).

The problem is that peoples expectations are different. Your "perfectly fine" may be my "unacceptably slow". I haven't ever seen a 5 year old machine that I wouldn't want to replace with a reasonable spec. current generation machine.
 
srichards said:
My dad still has the same machine he bought in 97. It runs just as well because he's never updated/changed a thing!! It doesn't go on the internet so it hasn't picked up anything nasty.
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As long as you only want to do what you did in '97, then it will be fine. Me - I've moved on a bit in what I use computers for since then.....

A top of the range machine from 1997 will be beaten hands down for processing, memory speed and disk speed by even a low power netbook from today.
 
arad85 said:
The problem is that peoples expectations are different. Your "perfectly fine" may be my "unacceptably slow". I haven't ever seen a 5 year old machine that I wouldn't want to replace with a reasonable spec. current generation machine.
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As a PS to this, I have just upgraded my works laptop from a P8600 with 2G to an i5-2540M with 8G and an SSD simply because I found it unusable. But I am used to using my home PCs which are an i7-2600K with 16G overclocked to 4.3GHz and a laptop with i7-2630QM with a very fast SSD (bought the fastest I could find at 515M/s read, 440M/s write).
 
arad85 said:
As long as you only want to do what you did in '97, then it will be fine. Me - I've moved on a bit in what I use computers for since then.....

A top of the range machine from 1997 will be beaten hands down for processing, memory speed and disk speed by even a low power netbook from today.
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That's the point. If you're requirements and s/w haven't changed then an upgrade isn't necessary! Also the newer versions of windows are far slower and more bloated so the actual performance improvement isn't as much as you'd think anyway.

It was a cheap budget machine. Cost him £400 I think. I don't think a £400 machine today with windows 7 would actually be that much quicker in actual use than his is for what he uses it for.
 
srichards said:
I don't think a £400 machine today with windows 7 would actually be that much quicker in actual use than his is for what he uses it for.
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I think you might be surprised...

What does he use it for? If it's not connected to the Net, it must be for a bit of word processing and possibly some spreadsheets/accounting and very little else.

£400 in 1997 was not a lot for a machine (I remember paying £1500 for a Tiny PC machine in 2000 that was a 600MHz single processor with 256MBytes of memory and a disk that was sized in a few - possibly tens of - Gigabytes IIRC). Are you sure it wasn't £1400? That would seem more like it from the prices around then...
 
srichards said:
Also the newer versions of windows are far slower and more bloated so the actual performance improvement isn't as much as you'd think anyway.
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so youre saying windows 7 on an i5 or i7 with 8gb isnt going to be much faster than a 1997 system say running w95 or XP (presuming an upgrade)?

:shrug:

my i7 boots w7 faster than my XP machine ever did. just because it has more bells and whistles doesnt mean its any worse performing when you take into account modern hardware.

im trying to think what i had back in 97, i think it was a 233Mhz CPU :lol:
 
It just depends. I've not found an absolute correlation. I'm just use to macs so I don't reboot anyway. They're just left to sleep and wake up. Experience between XP and vista was that on the same hardware vista was noticeably slower. I used a vista laptop a couple of years ago that was only a few months old and it was awful. I haven't used win7 so I can't compare it really.

He did pay £400 or so. He got it from a local independent pc builder. He kept the same monitor I think. I also paid about the same for mine that a pc knowledgeable friend built. AMD something or other. Cheap as chips. Same thing probably would have cost £1400 from pcworld in those days! I certainly saw similar specs for way more than he paid.

He just uses it for wordprocessing, often using wordstar... A new computer will not be any better. He doesn't want the internet so what he has does what he wants perfectly well. No complicated spreadsheets either. He still has the old version of office. Nothing has been changed. That's how it still works just as well. Once you start updating and upgrading applications then the bloat and slow downs start.
 
srichards said:
It just depends. I've not found an absolute correlation. I'm just use to macs so I don't reboot anyway.
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No, I don't reboot Windows often either - it's not just Macs that can sleep you know ;)
srichards said:
Experience between XP and vista was that on the same hardware vista was noticeably slower. I used a vista laptop a couple of years ago that was only a few months old and it was awful. I haven't used win7 so I can't compare it really.
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Yup. Vista was slower on the same hardware. But that hardware was probably old or underpowered.

srichards said:
He just uses it for wordprocessing, often using wordstar... A new computer will not be any better.
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No, it probably won't. But he isn't a typical user (certainly around here at least ;)).
srichards said:
Once you start updating and upgrading applications then the bloat and slow downs start.
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No. Once you start installing stuff with bloatware, that's where the slowdowns start. I really don't believe that a fresh install of original Win7 vs a fully updated SP1 Win7 would show any noticeable differences. Have one with 1001 things installed where the user has just clicked Yes to install whatever is suggested and I'd agree with you ;)
 
It's so wasteful though. It's about time o/s were written with efficiency in mind not throwing in the kitchen sink.
 
thanks andy for finishing my point :D

i cant think of a single inefficient OS currently in mainstream. im stuggling to see your point.

going back to lyntons question, i was going to point out a thread in classifieds that had an i5-2500k, motherboard, 16gb ram etc for £350 but the seller hadnt marked the items as sold.. :| some good deals do pop up in there from time to time though..
 
srichards said:
It's so wasteful though. It's about time o/s were written with efficiency in mind not throwing in the kitchen sink.
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It is not the os that is bloated but what users install on top of the os.

What would you change about Windows 7 to make it more efficient?
 
Cheers guys for all your help so far............ particularly Andy for explaining the differences between i3, i5 and i7.

Current PC specs are (This will mean more to you than it does me)

AMD Phenom 8550 Triple Core 2.2GHz, running Windows 7 Ultimate 32 bit.
3 Gb of RAM with 2.75 Gb usable.
It has Norton (latest version) and I have run malware stuff - nothing nasty in there.

Just seems a bit slower running CS5 and esp CS6 Beta. There's nothing really wrong with it, but would like a few more RAM. It is worth changing to 64 bit windoze and having 8Gb of RAM or is the processor not up to it?


I'll keep an eye on the classifieds - just wary of buying secondhand PC stuff.... (no logical reason to that of course)
 
If you go over 3gb you will need to got to 64 bit, I would try 8gn first before doing a big upgrade.
 
You'd notice a significant performance by going to a machine with an i5-2400/i5-2500 installed in it. 8G would also help as would a move to a 64bit OS. Depends if you're memory limited with what you are currently doing (is the disk going nearly all the time - if yes, you are memory limited?).
 
neil_g said:
This has popped up a few times and generally it's said that the best option for your money at the moment is an i5-2500 with at least 8gb memory and a ssd as boot and program drive.
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+1
 
Dale_d3100 said:
It is not the os that is bloated but what users install on top of the os.

What would you change about Windows 7 to make it more efficient?
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Whatever junk has been added in since XP to need a 3x faster processor, 4x the memory and 8x the hard drive space :) You compare current linux distributions and their hardware requirements are much less for a desktop system that fulfills the same functions.

Lion is even worse wanting a minimum of 2GB of RAM. It's appalling.
 
Xp started on 300mhz machine and by sp3 needed much more, you could run the original could on 64mb, sp3 you need 1gb to get it running nicely. Vista and windows 7 need double.

They have many improvements though. But any core 2 duo with 4gb of ram will run windows 7 nicely which is what I used on xp, This covers any machine from the last 3 years
 
srichards said:
Whatever junk has been added in since XP to need a 3x faster processor, 4x the memory and 8x the hard drive space :)
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Whether you call it junk or not - Moores Law applies. Processing/memory/disk doubles every 18 months. XP was released in 2001 - needing only 3x, 4x and 8x now is actually an improvement in real terms........

srichards said:
You compare current linux distributions and their hardware requirements are much less for a desktop system that fulfills the same functions.
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Yes. But then they aren't as bug free as OSX/Windows and I certainly wouldn't want to use one as my day to day environment...

srichards said:
Lion is even worse wanting a minimum of 2GB of RAM. It's appalling.
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I'm designing set-top boxes at the moment that have 2G of memory in them. And they'll be £250. It's appalling ;)
 
I never get this argument, you wouldn't ever make a new operating system with old hardware in mind. You make it to take advantage of new technology and faster hardware. Hell otherwise we'd never progress.
 
I didn't really find linux that buggy to be honest. A PITA to set up and get going but once up and running it would stay working for ever. Having been used to risc os on an acorn I was used to fast and reliable. Windows was a nasty shock! Used linux for several years until I went mac.

Leopard was another disappointment. Nearly binned that laptop as it couldn't keep a wireless connection to save its life. I had to sit with a network lead plugged in.

Depends on what you're doing with the set top box to need that 2GB as to how extravagant it is :)

I'm all for progress but what actually is it? My first os let me install software and run it. My current one lets me install software and run it. First linux machine with usb ports let me download photos from the camera. My mac does that now. No change there. I can print stuff. I can scan stuff. I can run open office. Same as before. Syncing with a mobile phone is about the only 'new' feature but I've had that since tiger.
 
neil_g said:
back in days gone by horses let us get around yet here we are all driving cars ;)
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Ha ha. But cars don't poop on the road and go a lot faster and further. You can see the benefit and do things you couldn't on a horse ie go to somewhere 200 miles away and back in a day. If you had a leccy car you still couldn't so they're the new horses :)

The only things I can think of which I can do now which I couldn't do then is sync with a mobile phone and sync music across different devices via itunes icloud thingy automagically.
 
srichards said:
The only things I can think of which I can do now which I couldn't do then is
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You don't go by the nickname of Luddite do you? :D

OK... here's a challenge - although it depends when "then" actually is. I'll start two lists, one hardware, one software and see what I can come up with in 5 minutes:

Hardware:
  • USB ports and all the plug and play that brings
  • Firewire ports
  • >4G memory
  • Resolutions over 1024x768 for less than the cost of a house
  • Digitally connected monitors that can display over 1024x768 without costing more than a house
  • Gigabit networking - in fact any networking at home
  • SATA drives (speed)
  • SSD drives (speed)
  • Webcams for Skype etc.
  • ADSL
  • FTTC/P (and the connectivity speed it brings)
  • Detachable hard drives (see USB/Firewire above)

Software:
  • Process RAW files at a rate quicker than one a day
  • Process digital video
  • Record off air broadcasts to disk (PVR functionality)
  • Games
  • Video content creation (e.g. Avatar)
  • The Net (and what it has evolved into including places like this)
  • Plug and play networking
  • Plug and play anything USB (huge s/w stack there)
  • General UI improvements
  • iplayer etc (although this is linked to broadband speed)
  • HTPCs - ability to decode/display HD video using software of your own choice.

BTW: I found plenty of issues with Linux - they do exist and it goes backwards as often as it goes forwards, but I still use it in the house, just not as a UI based OS.

Now, if all you do is use it as a typewriter with a memory, all of this will pass you by. But the technology above touches most of us on a daily basis. You may not realise it, but it does.

Anyone want to add any more?
 
I've had internet access since 1993 so I'm kind of over that :)

I had a moviemaker program on my acorn!

Resolution has changed. I'll agree there. The movie maker thing I mentioned was probably 320 x 180 or so.

PVR I've had since I got eyetv. That is later and kind of cool but I've had it so long I don't notice it. I've done video processing and had access to it for ages so again it doesn't seem anything new.

Most of the above I've had in one way or another for 10 years. That's what I mean. It's revisions of the same. I've never noticed RAW processing being slow. Mainly as I don't use it :D

The cloud based itunes and where apple can go with integrated multiple devices is the new thing to me even though it will be based on replication and synchronisation that has been around in one form or another for donkeys.
 
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