Upgrade advice

I have been out of the ins of outs of the technical things for quite some time and would like some advice on upgrading my desktop PC

My motherboard is shown below.

http://uk.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pi...

The first thing is RAM I am not a bit baffled about what is better for my system either 4 gig of DDR3 or 8 Gig of DDR2? or will it not make much difference?

Then on to storage. I compress lots of files to make into applications that can have in access of 120,000 files so I am thinking this would make a big difference. I also use Sony Vegas, Photoshop and large databases so I am thinking an SSD is the way forward which keeping my existing HDD.

I was wondering though what would be better or if it would make any difference if I had a SSD for the operating system and standard apps such as office and photoshop on one drive and then game on a separate SSD or does it not make a difference. I only ask as I prefer to keep my games on a separate drive but I have no idea why I do this!

Have a read:

http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,3983.0....

For RAM is would depend on your own usage. Personally I doubt there would much of a difference in performance between 4GB DDR2 and 4GB DDR3 (i.e. I don't think this board or its CPU (Core 2 duo?) will utilise the bandwidth of DDR3 fully).

Having said all that, more memory is better, and if you're using Photoshop and SSDs, you might want as little SSD usage as possible (swapfile, that is), so in my opinion, go for the 8GB solution.

Hard Drive: I don't use SSDs personally, and if you have GBs of data being accessed a lot, I would probably go for a fast C: drive (perhaps a SSD) and a fast, non-SSD files drive, such as a Samsung Spingpoint F3 or a more up to date version of that. I prefer WD raptor / velociraptor for C: but some of the bigger, newer drives are faster in some ways.

Thanks, the processor I have is the 2.40 gigahertz Intel Core2 Quad however would it be worthwhile upgrading this while I am things?

A second drive like the Samsung Spingpoint F3 sounds the best solution really as I do have around 700gig worth of files that I do need to keep. I think this current HD I have is getting slower and slower by the day but it has been abused quite a bit for the past few years!

The new velociraptors are coming 250GB, 500GB and 1000GB flavours and according to a benchtest site are three times faster than the one I have.

I'd check out the 1000GB performance and price over the competition. They tend to be pricey, and there's not point to them if you're not accessing them a lot.

I fancy a 250GB one as a replacement for my C:

The Q6600 (is what I am guessing you have) is a bit long in the tooth now, so yes, I'd upgrade it.

You don't say whether you are running a 32-bit or 64-bit Operating System. If 32- bit go for the 4GB DDR3 - it's cheaper and the OS won't use all of it anyway. If 64-bit go for the 8GB - it's more expensive and a little slower, but you can never have too much RAM.

As for disks, a 120GB SSD would be fine for OS and programs that you use most and they're pretty cheap nowadays. I don't worry too much about the speed of data (and less frequently used program) disks and stick with the WD Green ones - they are fairly cheap, quiet, and energy efficient. With plenty of RAM the OS caches data efficiently anyway, so disk speed is not crucial.

I wouldn't touch 'green' drives with a bargepole personally. You want as fast as you can afford, as the HDD is the slowest component. If the OP is regularly accessing large amounts of data, green is not the way to go.

No, Camie. You may want as fast as you can afford; I want quiet, efficient, and as fast as I need. Everyone's needs are different.

I have never found the speed of green hard drives to be a problem when doing normal things like gaming, video editing/conversion and the like. If I were running a heavy database system, where random access to large amounts of data is necessary then I would use faster drives. But the normal applications that I use mostly access data in a linear fashion; with moderns drives and OSs that is very efficient, even if the drive isn't the fastest possible, due to caching and read-ahead.

The "You" was the royal or collective you.

Most people (AEP excepted) want the fastest drive they can afford. I'll say it again. As the slowest part of the system...

If you want quiet (silent), go SSD. Or there are noise reduction cases/enclosures.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

The "You" was the royal or collective you.

Most people (AEP excepted) want the fastest drive they can afford. I'll say it again. As the slowest part of the system...

If you want quiet (silent), go SSD. Or there are noise reduction cases/enclosures.

SSD drives are the way to go.

I stuck an Intel 330 series 180 gigabyte SSD into my wife's laptop for £80 and the sheer jump in perceived speed made it looked like it was a whole new system.

Win 7 takes less than 10 secons to come up from power on to installing all the startup tasks including Kaspersky.

I have also stuck an Intel 520 series 480 gigabyte SSD into my new build high spec system for £350 and startup is also less than 10 seconds but I think this is now due as the disk doesn't access while the windows 7 animation is happening. if I could dump that animation I could take 2-3 seconds off that.

Intel SSD drives come with a 3 year warrenty on the 300 series and 5 years on the 500 series so Intel are confident on their product lasting and the closest HDD warrenty I have seen that matches that is my 3TB red NAS drive from WD with a 3 year warrenty.

I am running my system on a tri-boot with a relatively small 2gig swap file on each windows install and have all my programs on the SSD and have an external 2TB HDD drive in an Icy Box enclosure.for data.on an esata connection.

As for the OP's original question without knowing their full system spec I would say that more memory is better than faster memory for video editing, I had big problems with just 4gigabytes on my previous system using pinncle studio and the move to 8 gigabytes made a huge difference.

Also I would say going to a SSD for the windows install, swap files and programs and another HDD for data, rendering and video capturing. may give a very nice jump in percieved performance.

Also if the OP does a lot of video capturing it is recommened by the capture card manufacturers to capture onto a drive that doesn't have a windows swap file on it anyways.

So to summerise get a SSD drive (I would recommend Intel) and an upgrade to 8 gigs of DDR2 memory (although you will need to check to make sure your mobo can actually take that much) and I would think you will see a nice jump in performance.

Edited by deleted (Mon 10-Dec-12 14:46:10)