My computer seem to work faster with Windows 7. Even the games seem to play better. Your experience might vary but your high end system should work pretty good with it.
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02:02 PM
Khw Member
Posts: 11139 From: South Weber, UT. U.S.A. Registered: Jun 2008
A quad core processor may actually be slower then a dual core (in certain apps)
Yeah, we got dual core computers to help speed up Everquest back when we played and it was a mistake. The game your playing has to be built to take advantage of multiple cores otherwise it's a mute point. We had to change proporties and dedicate Everquest to one core otherwise it was real laggy if it didn't just outright crash on us.
[This message has been edited by Khw (edited 12-20-2009).]
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02:14 PM
Boondawg Member
Posts: 38235 From: Displaced Alaskan Registered: Jun 2003
More memory... Cheaper + you'll be set for a while.
Get a better cooling solution (I know the Asus is good, but you could upgrade still) and overclock the CPU a bit more.
Don't forget, depending in what you're playing, you might just have to set processor affinity to a single core for older stuff to operate properly.
My AMD quad (first gen Pehnom - early adopter here) wouldn't run some apps very well in XP until I set them to take advantage of only core. Happy sailing after that. Until XP totally crashed altogether.
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03:20 PM
Formula88 Member
Posts: 53788 From: Raleigh NC Registered: Jan 2001
If your games don't take advantage of multi-core processors, going to a quad core can actually slow you down if you go to a lower clock speed to get more cores. I'd go for more memory on the Core2 until you're ready to dump that for a Core i7 and triple channel memory.
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Originally posted by skuzzbomer:
Get a better cooling solution (I know the Asus is good, but you could upgrade still) and overclock the CPU a bit more.
Boonie doesn't need a better cooling solution - he just needs to set his PC outside.
[This message has been edited by Formula88 (edited 12-20-2009).]
Unless the game you're playing utlizes more than 2 cores you'll lose performance for gaming. The 9300 you listed you'll likely never be able to see a 3.8 overclock without water cooling so it will be a downgrade for gaming. To really open up your rig you'd need a different form of cooling and to crank up that processors OC (most of the e8400's were overclocking beasts). The extreme cpu's for 775 were great but really ran hot and you need good cooling for those to utilize the unlocked multipliers to get the high overclocks.
So I'd focus on getting windows 7 for your setup given your current scenario.
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04:19 PM
PFF
System Bot
Boondawg Member
Posts: 38235 From: Displaced Alaskan Registered: Jun 2003
The quad-core processor with the slower clock speed will actually be a downgrade, for the most part. Only in situations where you have all 4 cores being fully utilized (i.e. almost never), will you see a performance increase.
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Originally posted by Boondawg: But doesn't Windows 7 just love 8 Gigs of memory?
You may be thinking of Vista (which is a memory hog). The memory requirements of Win7 are similar to those of WinXP. And since your computer already has 4GB of RAM, it should be good 2 go.
You didn't mention what hard drive(s) your computer uses. The disc drives are the slowest components in a modern computer.
[This message has been edited by Blacktree (edited 12-20-2009).]
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04:32 PM
Boondawg Member
Posts: 38235 From: Displaced Alaskan Registered: Jun 2003
That's a Western Digital Caviar SE16 7200RPM Serial ATA 250GB HD. 9 second ready time which is 'decent'.
I think he was making sure you didn't have a 5400 RPM ancient drive. You could benefit from solid state drive. Can get an OCZ 30GB Vertex SSD for about $100 now. Use it for the OS/Boot drive and then use the 250gb for media storage. Can drag and drop which game you want to use to the SSD. Would be a good pairing with win7.
[This message has been edited by InTheLead (edited 12-20-2009).]
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05:20 PM
Formula88 Member
Posts: 53788 From: Raleigh NC Registered: Jan 2001
That's not bad, but it's definitely slowing down your program load times. I'd recommend either the Caviar RE series 7200 RPM drives, or the obvious choice, a 10k rpm Velociraptor. I have two of the original generation 72Gb Raptors in a RAID 0 for my OS drive, and on the splash screens that some games show during level loads they usually have a little blurb or something for you to read.... I usually don't have enough time to read the blurb before the next level begins. And those drives are slow compared to the new ones.
4Gb of RAM is good. 8Gb would be better, but not really necessary. Newegg currently has 300 Gb Velociraptor drives for $199. That would probably give you the best performance improvement for your dollar considering the hardware you already have. Right now you have a Corvette with a supercharger and Road Race suspension, running on bias ply tires.
Here you go Boonie, your next system:
[This message has been edited by Formula88 (edited 12-20-2009).]
That's not bad, but it's definitely slowing down your program load times. I'd recommend either the Caviar RE series 7200 RPM drives, or the obvious choice, a 10k rpm Velociraptor. I have two of the original generation 72Gb Raptors in a RAID 0 for my OS drive, and on the splash screens that some games show during level loads they usually have a little blurb or something for you to read.... I usually don't have enough time to read the blurb before the next level begins. And those drives are slow compared to the new ones.
4Gb of RAM is good. 8Gb would be better, but not really necessary. Newegg currently has 300 Gb Velociraptor drives for $199. That would probably give you the best performance improvement for your dollar considering the hardware you already have. Right now you have a Corvette with a supercharger and Road Race suspension, running on bias ply tires.
Here you go Boonie, your next system:
I meant 9 seconds I left the 'y' off of ready. The ready time for this drive is 9 seconds. It can be sort of irritating if you use power management then come back to resume and have to wait for a long spin up/ready time and this ones not bad at all so if he stayed with with a platter setup I don't see any reason not to keep what he has. I wouldn't waste more money on another platter HD unless it were a 2TB 64mb cache Barracuda XT. SSD is expensive per GB but completely wipes the floor with any mechanical platter HD. I see zero reason to waste money on one at this point in technology. Unless it's for pure storage capacity, otherwise SSD is the way to go. Access times are unmatched.
[This message has been edited by InTheLead (edited 12-20-2009).]
