upgrading PC components, help

CaveDweller

CaveDweller

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I'm after making my PC a bit faster. Doing video work and general use has gotten pretty slow.

The specs are:

Windows 7 64bit
i5 4670 processor
nvidia MSI GTX 750...I think
8GB ram

I'm not the most clued up about PC's. What would be the easiest thing for me to upgrade for faster performance?

Cheers
 
probably the easiest and cheapest option would be to upgrade your RAM, 8GB nowadays is pretty average! also remember to de-clutter your cookies and temp internet files, also defrag your hard drive will help too! I would go for the RAM if you could afford it anyway, cant have too much RAM LOL.
 
James A Robertson said:
probably the easiest and cheapest option would be to upgrade your RAM, 8GB nowadays is pretty average! also remember to de-clutter your cookies and temp internet files, also defrag your hard drive will help too! I would go for the RAM if you could afford it anyway, cant have too much RAM LOL.
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lol cheers. I clear all my cookies, temp folders, etc everyday, slow PC or not. I'll try the RAM first then.

I thought I would have needed more than 8GB when I build the PC two years ago, but I ended up putting my money towards other components. I just built a pretty basic PC to start with with the intention I'd be able to upgrade parts easily, rather than using the laptop I had before.
 
As @petersmart says, an SSD is the thing that'll give the most noticeable speed boost, and many retail SSDs come with a utility to transfer your existing system disk to the SSD. Unless the PC is literally unusable, you'll spend more time than you save, fiddling with clearing cookies/temp files/etc.

For video, more RAM and CPU is better. You can probably fit a maximum of 32GB (dependent on how many slots your system board has). I've got 24GB in my PC at home (it was cheap to do, so I did :))
 
Definitely a SSD (ideally 240gb ish) then Ram I would say.

You then load Windows and software onto the SSD and all your files to your hard drive. This will make your PC much faster.
 
Thanks all, completely forgot about an SSD. I have been wanting one for a while.
 
Paul, I'd go so far as to suggest that you should install an SSD and then assess whether you need to spend any more money and time at all.
 
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pwhysall said:
Paul, I'd go so far as to suggest that you should install an SSD and then assess whether you need to spend any more money and time at all.
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To be honest for the cost of some extra RAM I'll just get both. I'm looking to move from my Canon 550D to a Nikon D750 soon so if my computer is slow now then it's going to need some extra help when I upgrade cameras. Especially with the D750 being able to do 1080p video at 60p.


When do you normally replace/upgrade CPU's? Should my i5 4670 last a fair while yet?
 
Bear in mind that a CPU replacement can result in more significant surgery as, depending on the situation, you may need to replace the system board. And that's an "everything out" job.

Good opportunity to clean everything, though :)
 
Only thing I'd add is check what your PC is loading at startup and disable any you do not need. Sometimes when installing software it can be added to the startup list even though it may be used only occasionally. The only things you really need in the list are your antivirus and firewall (unless you are using the Windows firewall).

Dave

Also a very full hard drive can slow things.
 
SSD, memory and a fresh install. Then load in only programs you use.
 
CaveDweller said:
I'm after making my PC a bit faster. Doing video work and general use has gotten pretty slow.

The specs are:

Windows 7 64bit
i5 4670 processor
nvidia MSI GTX 750...I think
8GB ram

I'm not the most clued up about PC's. What would be the easiest thing for me to upgrade for faster performance?

Cheers
Click to expand...


For video work, there are three tihngs that will help, either in combination, or singularly.

More cores: The more working threads you have the faster your videos will render. Your current i5 has 4 cores, but no hyperthreading, so only has 4 threads, whereas upgrading to a i7 4790 will give you 8 threads and a noticeable boost, particularly with software that is threaded well such as Premier Pro.

pwhysall said:
Bear in mind that a CPU replacement can result in more significant surgery as, depending on the situation, you may need to replace the system board. And that's an "everything out" job.

Good opportunity to clean everything, though :)
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Not in the above case.... both his, and the one recommended above are socket 1150... no problems.. just check whether it needs a BIOS update.


You don't mention budget, but 6 core (12 threads) and 8 core (16 threads) are available, but that WOULD also need a motherboard upgrade... and 8 core will also need DDR4 RAM, so you're getting close to building a new machine there.

More Memory: 16GB should really be the minimum for video rendering as it can get pretty memory intensive when using lots of effects.

Doing both the above would be my choice.

If you use software that can make use of it, a decent MVidia Quadro or AMD Fire GPU is the way to go, and shift the rendering to the GPU, but again, fast Quadro and Fire cards are expensive.

If you do NOT upgrade RAM, fitting a DEDICATED SSD for scratch disk (not used by Windows... just for scratch disk) can be of benefit too.... but RAM is cheap, so fill your boots.

Best bang for the buck would be another 8GB and upgrade to a i7 that has 8 worker threads.
 
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Pookeyhead said:
Best bang for the buck would be another 8GB and upgrade to a i7 that has 8 worker threads.
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I disagree. SSD and more RAM IMHO. i7 will max at ~15% faster than i5. A hex core will be 50% faster than an i5 but an SSD is many, many times faster than a HDD for general purpose stuff (as the access time is so much lower).... And a decent graphics card if using a GPU-accelerated video editor.
 
arad85 said:
I disagree. SSD and more RAM IMHO. i7 will max at ~15% faster than i5. A hex core will be 50% faster than an i5 but an SSD is many, many times faster than a HDD for general purpose stuff (as the access time is so much lower).... And a decent graphics card if using a GPU-accelerated video editor.
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A lot of this is dependent on what software you are using though... and we don't actually what the OP is using. For example... Premiere CS6 or earlier does NOT use the GPU for encoding. It only uses it for playing of effects in the preview panel (Mercury Playback Engine). When actually rendering/encoding, it goes nowhere near the GPU, whereas CC does.... and Vegas Pro does for example, and can use any card due to Open CL use, rather than CUDA. If the OP's software supports Quick Sync, then he may not need a separate GPU at all, as his CPU has Intel HD4600 graphics built in.. which is actually very fast at encoding video so long as the software can utilise Quick Sync


With 16GB or over, I find disc usage is pretty light here, so a SSD is only gonna speed things up if a scratch disk is actually being used heavily... A SSD is faster than a HDD by a long way, yes... but it's still a lot slower than RAM. If you think you'll get a large decrease in encoding times by adding a SSD you're very, very, very much mistaken :) Only if you're actually running out of memory will you see a large increase in encoding performance.

Besides... 15% is not to be sneezed at. If encoding on the CPU and encoding 90 minutes of 4K content.. 15% can actually = 35 minutes or more. You can do a lot in 35 minutes.
 
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RAID is useless unless you want to transfer large files around. SSD is the way to go for general use, its all about access time and small read writes. RAID is sustained read writes, access times get fractionally longer.

Check how much RAM your using, if your using the full 8GB then add another 8.
 
Maybe so. However, transferring large images and video files is a breeze and with RAID, if any one drive fails then there will be enough information on the other drives to rescue the computer. So don't tell me RAID is useless!
 
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Jeff Watson said:
Maybe so. However, transferring large images and video files is a breeze and with RAID, if any one drive fails then there will be enough information on the other drives to rescue the computer. So don't tell me RAID is useless!
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Did you read my post past the first three words?

SSD for a primary drive will make the most difference. RAID has its place but IS rubbish for things like windows and program loading which is many small files.
 
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Pookeyhead said:
A lot of this is dependent on what software you are using though... and we don't actually what the OP is using. For example... Premiere CS6 or earlier does NOT use the GPU for encoding. It only uses it for playing of effects in the preview panel (Mercury Playback Engine). When actually rendering/encoding, it goes nowhere near the GPU, whereas CC does.... and Vegas Pro does for example, and can use any card due to Open CL use, rather than CUDA. If the OP's software supports Quick Sync, then he may not need a separate GPU at all, as his CPU has Intel HD4600 graphics built in.. which is actually very fast at encoding video so long as the software can utilise Quick Sync
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Yup, I'd agree with that, which is why I said "if using GPU-accelerated software" ;)


Pookeyhead said:
With 16GB or over, I find disc usage is pretty light here, so a SSD is only gonna speed things up if a scratch disk is actually being used heavily... A SSD is faster than a HDD by a long way, yes... but it's still a lot slower than RAM. If you think you'll get a large decrease in encoding times by adding a SSD you're very, very, very much mistaken :) Only if you're actually running out of memory will you see a large increase in encoding performance.
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No - encoding performance will change very little, you'll see an increase in general performance as access times are hundreds of times quicker and I/O performance is ~5x as quick. The machine will boot faster and feel snappier - and will be much more usable (i.e. it will feel faster) than it would if you moved to an i7 + HDD.

Pookeyhead said:
Besides... 15% is not to be sneezed at. If encoding on the CPU and encoding 90 minutes of 4K content.. 15% can actually = 35 minutes or more. You can do a lot in 35 minutes.
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Sorry... when was 15% of 90 equal to 35? It's equal to 13.5. 35 is more like the jump you'd get going to a hex core, which I'd be suggesting if he spends all day encoding 4k video, but the odd encode won't make that much difference IMHO.
 
Jeff Watson said:
Nobody has mentioned RAID.

Before you make any decisions read this.

https://romaco.ca/blog/2011/01/25/h...puter-with-raid-and-why-you-dont-need-an-ssd/
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That article is 4 years old. SSDs have come a long way since then. A single 512G SSD for normal day-to-day work will beat the pants off a 4 disk RAID10 system for performance. There is very little in it for failure rates as a RAID10 array has no data parity, so you can't tell when data is degrading on one of the RAID arrays - what does the disk controller do when it reads data from one of the RAID1 pairs and they differ for example?

For data security, you need backups, not RAID. For performance, SSDs win hands down (unless you are doing enterprise level stuff with multiple 15k SAS drives or the like). Don't get me wrong, I use RAID, but not for the main disks. RAID is used for my backup drive, but all my main work disks are SSDs (all laptops, all desktops - my main desktop has SSD boot + SSD user drive - and all boot drives for servers and the like).

Where mech HDDs win out is on storage space. If you need lots of storage, I'd go with SSD boot drive (say 256G), SSD user disk (512G) where all processing and all current data is kept, and a third large HDD as an archive drive. I'd also have a darned good backup strategy involving a RAID5/RAID6 server somewhere.
 
I wouldn't recommend upgrading the CPU in this instance, but the 15% Andy keeps banging on about is conservative.
It might be beneficial for video rendering, but as has already been said an SSD sounds like the most beneficial upgrade.

I think my dream machine would probably have separate SSDs for operating system, "scratch disks" and the work I'm currently editing.
 
afasoas said:
but the 15% Andy keeps banging on about is conservative.
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It's based on me turning off hyperthreading on my i7 in the BIOS and rerunning the same video encoding (1 hour long HD program recorded off air recoded by ffmpeg) and seeing what the difference in performance was. Unless I'm misremembering the figures (which is always possible). I know I wasn't impressed by real world hyperthreading performance after that as video encoding is generally the only time CPUs get used 100%....
 
arad85 said:
No - encoding performance will change very little, you'll see an increase in general performance as access times are hundreds of times quicker and I/O performance is ~5x as quick. The machine will boot faster and feel snappier - and will be much more usable (i.e. it will feel faster) than it would if you moved to an i7 + HDD.
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I know.. I have 2 of them in RAID0 for a boot device, and one as a scratch disk. My entire post was referring to video encoding though.

arad85 said:
Sorry... when was 15% of 90 equal to 35? It's equal to 13.5. 35 is more like the jump you'd get going to a hex core, which I'd be suggesting if he spends all day encoding 4k video, but the odd encode won't make that much difference IMHO.
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Huh? LOL... I mean 90 minutes worth of video... not a video that takes 90 minutes to encode ya' numpty! :) Even 1080P at high bitrates can take a very long time to encode. 15% is a very worthwhile performance increase. I have a hex core machine... I know exactly the gains you get... and we don't know how much video encoding he actually does.
 
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And my original post was referring to general purpose, so why quote it for a post entirely about video ;)

If you're doing that much encoding, you've got the wrong machine. A dual Xeon server (even an old one) with some SAS disks in will be a far far better encode farm than any i5/i7. But as you say, we don't know how much/what is being encoded.

And I know you have a hex core - it's why I mentioned it - in two separate posts ;)
 
You don't have to do "that" much to make it a factor when building a machine. I probably use video 5 times a year, but that's enough to make it a factor. Why else you think I bought a hexcore machine? It offers no advantage to every day tasks, gaming or photography?

Xeons aren't all that. Anyone who knows what they are doing will go down the heavily overclocked octacore route. Far more bang for buck. They'll also be using encoders that can offload to a bunch of GPUs via CUAD or Open CL.

SSDs only really give a strong advantage when loading apps, and booting. Once apps are up and running, the only advantage to SSDs is when paging to them due to lack of RAM. RAM is cheap... fill your boots. If I had to choose between a 16GB machine with a SSD scratch disk, and a machine with 32GB of Ram, it would be the latter every day of the week.
 
No performance gain going from 8gig of RAM to 16, doubtful if you'd even use it.
 
Pookeyhead said:
16GB machine with a SSD scratch disk, and a machine with 32GB of Ram, it would be the latter every day of the week.
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What about a machine with 16G of RAM and SSD and 32G and HDD? It's only you mentioning SSD and scratch disk in the same breath, everyone else is suggesting it as a general purpose upgrade. Which it is. No matter how much you want to dismiss it.
 
arad85 said:
What about a machine with 16G of RAM and SSD and 32G and HDD? It's only you mentioning SSD and scratch disk in the same breath, everyone else is suggesting it as a general purpose upgrade. Which it is. No matter how much you want to dismiss it.
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How can it have 16GB or RAM and 32GB of RAM?

Why are you arguing? One of the things he's interested in is video editing and production. I gave some advice on what will improve the performance for that. It's processor intensive - a fast processor will be of great benefit. A SSD will only imporve video rendering and encoding speeds if the machine is reliant on a scratch disk. That's to be avoided at all costs however, as even a SSD is massively slower than RAM.

I chose to give advice on what I have experience with. I've never said a SSD will not improve general performance. However, I'm just saying that a machine with sufficient RAM will only see improvements on boot times and application loading/File saving by having a SSD. Actual processing times will not improve as a result of having one. No one's saying they're not worth having, I'm just clarifying what exactly those gains will be.
 
Thanks for all the tips(y) I'm going to get some goodies ordered today as well as a new graphics card.
 
Pookeyhead said:
However, I'm just saying that a machine with sufficient RAM will only see improvements on boot times and application loading/File saving by having a SSD.
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This is not actually true, at least for Windows.

Pretty much every operation a computer carries out involves the manipulation of the contents of memory, and the vast majority of memory operations involves paging of one kind or another. Due to the way Windows paging works, simply adding RAM does not eliminate the requirement for paging, and nor does it prevent paging during the handling of large objects in memory. Even if you turn off the pagefile (highly inadvisable!), Windows will still page, as the OS regards loaded executables and DLLs as demand-paged memory anyway.

I would suggest that an (artificial) example case where an SSD will not yield significant performance benefits vs rotating rust is when a small data set has a large number of computations performed on it, and thus the data stays paged in and there is little or no I/O. By "small" I mean "small enough to fit into the CPU's L2 cache".

tl;dr: no matter what your workload, get an SSD and put the OS and pagefile on it. Everything will go quicker, all the time.
 
I'm not disagreeing per se. Any new build should have a SSD for it's boot partition. There's just no reason not to. However... on paper, you're right, but the biggest gains people see is when they have a PC with limited RAM that's relying quite heavily on a page file to a mechanical hard drive. Obviously the gains will be massive. That's a sticking plaster on a broken leg IMO though. If your machine is constantly relying on a swap file (not routine I/O operations) then you need more memory. The gains made by fitting a SSD to machine with LOTS of RAM are not quite so dramatic. I'm not arguing AGAINST SSDs.. I hope that's not what you think I'm doing. I think they're brilliant. 12 seconds to boot to a functional desktop here... for that reason alone they're worth having. I was merely pointing out that the gains diminish if your machine was generously equipped with RAM to begin with.
 
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