Processor Upgrade help

[Aotrs Commander]

I am very nominally thinking it might be time I need to upgrade my processors. (Nominally, since I'm not sure how affordable it is this year, and the ones I currently have ain't broken.)

I currently have an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz (according to an online system spec determiner), which I inherited what looks like 2013 (slightly before from when I last replaced my graphics card (currently a 2GB Gddr5 factory superclocked EVEA Gtx 760, at the time very good value for money).

I have 12 gig of RAM (DDR 3 XMX Corsair in three units of four - the motherboard is a bit odd. I don't know what the motherboard is, since as I say, I inherited it and the processers (and onboard soundcard) for nowt from an AV fan who was my Dad's mate and he was gonna chuck it out.



The games I play tend not to be hugely graphically demanding; Total War Warhammer 1 is, for for the first time, complaining a little bit (I get the occasional lag) and according to the specs, I'm above the minimum, but below the recommended in terms of processor (and were I to get TWWH2, below the dedicated Video RAM, though I suspect that'll just have to go bunnies. (Witcher 3, which I still haven't played, also says my processor is a bit below to minimum, partly why I never rushed to get it.)

So, given that, and bearing in mind I want to re-use basically everything except the processor (and, I highly suspect, the motherboard) - can't afford not to - what sort of thing should I be looking at? We're looking for a mid-range PC, capable of running stuff adequately (honestly, top-end graphics and such are largely wasted on me anyway!)

[Fri]

I'm not sure if this matters, but recently they had just found a huge problem with core architecture of intel and amd processors from the last few years. Like, it's a processor design problem. I think they're currently patching it.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3245508/components-processors/intel-responds-to-the-cpu-kernel-bug.html

[Gnoman]

You will have to buy a new motherboard, processor, and RAM.

They haven't made a processor that fits your mobo in many years, and there have been several improvements in RAM design since. This means that the new chips are not compatible with the old sockets (and vice versa).

Depending on your budget, and how concerned you are about Meltdown, you have a range of options. You might want to wait another year or two until the prepatched Intel chips come out.

[Aotrs Commander]

You will have to buy a new motherboard, processor, and RAM.

They haven't made a processor that fits your mobo in many years, and there have been several improvements in RAM design since. This means that the new chips are not compatible with the old sockets (and vice versa).

Depending on your budget, and how concerned you are about Meltdown, you have a range of options. You might want to wait another year or two until the prepatched Intel chips come out.

RAM improvements that are completely incompatible? Because I almost certain can't afford to replace 12gig of RAM and a processor and a motherboard (and almost certainly the case) all at once - that's probably taking it into the £300-400 quid mark, is it not?

[halfeye]

RAM improvements that are completely incompatible? Because I almost certain can't afford to replace 12gig of RAM and a processor and a motherboard (and almost certainly the case) all at once - that's probably taking it into the £300-400 quid mark, is it not?

I think you can still get DDR3, but the current CPUs want DDR4. Waiting a month or two for CPU and motherboard is probably sensible at this point, the prices might even go down on the current stock, or it might be a complete fizzle, but you can't rely on that.

[Aotrs Commander]

Well, I'm not in an immediate hurry (unless I can find something on sale while sales are still on or something).

I've been having a nosey on Amazon and Maplin... But really, I have only the most basic idea of what I even need. (It's been a LOOONG time since I had to buy a motherboard, and possibly never.)

What about sound cards? I think my current one is on-board (and that's fine, that's all I want, I'm just not fussy so long as its functional) - is that par for the course these days, or am I likely to need one (and if so, are there compatibility stuff to worry about with them...?)

I'm not even sure what sort of attachments I might need to be looking for.

My current system has a DVD drive, 2 HDDs, a card reader and my graphics card attached; I use about... What, three USBs (I think, mouse, speakers and printer and occasionally joystick) in the back, and the card reader has a couple at the front.


The PSU, I hope should be sufficient, since I bought a pretty big 750W one with a bazillion various connectors. (I assume that power requirements fo processors and motherboards have not drasitically increased in the meantime...?)

[factotum]

Your processor only supports DDR3 RAM, if you're correct about it being an i7-920 (if you're not sure, you could download CPU-Z from www.cpuid.com to find out). Modern processors need DDR4, as already mentioned, so you're realistically looking at a complete motherboard and RAM swap on top of the CPU. A decent budget board can be had for around £100 and 16Gb of DDR4 is £150, so that's £250 + the price of the CPU itself. I think you're realistically looking at a budget of at least £400 to see any major improvement. You ought to be able to re-use your existing case so long as it isn't some proprietary Dell/HP or whatever item. Sound is almost invariably on-board these days, although I believe you still get better sound quality by having a discrete sound card--probably not something to worry about unless you're a major audiophile, though.

Are you sure it's the CPU that's the cause of your lag in games, though? You may not think that the likes of Total War: Warhammer is graphically demanding, but a GTX760 is not exactly a powerhouse by today's standards.

[Aotrs Commander]

Your processor only supports DDR3 RAM, if you're correct about it being an i7-920 (if you're not sure, you could download CPU-Z from www.cpuid.com to find out). Modern processors need DDR4, as already mentioned, so you're realistically looking at a complete motherboard and RAM swap on top of the CPU. A decent budget board can be had for around £100 and 16Gb of DDR4 is £150, so that's £250 + the price of the CPU itself. I think you're realistically looking at a budget of at least £400 to see any major improvement.

Well. Crap.


You ought to be able to re-use your existing case so long as it isn't some proprietary Dell/HP or whatever item.

Which I think it pretty much is, actually. (It's got DELL printed on the side in big plastic letters.)

Also, it's one of them compact cases - getting my whacking great GTX 720's massive fans (I bought this specific brand because it was highly rated and one of the points was it had good - if jolly big! - fans. I am absolute not a nuts-and-bolts techie (I'm a necromancer not a computer technician - hell, I'll be getting one of other of my mates to be doing the actual fitting! - but the write-ups on the EVEA version were all good.) It is not a thing I would have taken for choice, but the price, was as they say, right at "he phoned my Dad up to see if he could have us take it to the tip and Dad said, 'instead, we'll come and pick it up and have it!'" It was basically everything but the hard drive (though I think we replaced the graphics card which better, and the one prior to my current one.)


Are you sure it's the CPU that's the cause of your lag in games, though? You may not think that the likes of Total War: Warhammer is graphically demanding, but a GTX760 is not exactly a powerhouse by today's standards.

Possibly, possibly not. (It occasionally stalls for a few seconds, it's hardly unlivable with - it's an occasional minor nuisence at best.) TWWH did say the "memory was low" and if I turned on unlimited virtual it might do that... I wouldn't have thought about it, but I happened to check the Total War Warhammer 2 thread today and some people had said they couldn't run it. Which made me thikn "wait, can I?" So I went and found a "can I run it?" thing to have a nosey. So my concern is more that a) the "can I run it" (for Warhammer Total War 2 and Witcher 3) is principally highlighting my processor as being one of the components that falling behind and b) after today realising that this system is five years old since I've had it, and I don't know how long the chap had it before me. So it could be six/seven years old.

And seeing as though this machine is... Kinda critical for my actual day job, I'd rather look into doing a bit more future proofing before it goes dead unexpectedly or something.



(I suppose it also might not hurt my CAD work in terms of processing speed maybe - certainly when we had this one, bits I'd found TurboCAD refused to do before it did now, though that might be all the RAM.)



The most ANNOYING thing about the RAM? I bought it - and the damn graphics card - because they were the recommended sort of level for Star Citizen/Squadron 42, which I'd expected to be playing within a couple of years of the inception of the Kickstarter. The more fool me. Nothing bloody else I have I think even looks at it all, really! (Given as I play stuff like EUIV or twenty-year old city-builders and whatnot...!) At the time I replaced my graphics card, even, it must have thought it had the easiest gig in the world, because I was predominatly playing Pharoah...!

[factotum]

Well, if it's a Dell case you might need to replace it as well, yes. This is starting to sound like a pretty major job--you're getting a new case, motherboard, CPU and RAM, putting those together, then transplanting the drives, PSU and graphics card out of your old machine. Then there's a chance your Windows installation won't work on the new hardware, so you'd need to have a plan to reinstall it and your commonly-used applications in case the worst happened. Really not sure what to advise at this stage, especially since you say the machine is critical to your day job...I'd be inclined to maybe save up for an entire new machine so you can run the two in parallel for a while and gradually get the applications you use transferred over, rather than having to roll the dice on getting everything switched over and working in one go.

[tyckspoon]

Bloomfield (https://ark.intel.com/products/codename/28102/Bloomfield) was the family name of that processor when they came out; they were in production from late 2008 to early 2010. The 920 was the entry-level i7 in that family; if you want a drop-in upgrade, you're looking for a higher-clocked model from that same family. Those are probably going to be mostly used chips at this point, so that's up to you to decide if you're comfortable buying used. Google suggests the 960 (the highest end standard consumer chip from that family - there were some faster ones done as extreme enthusiast models) runs from about 60 to $100 depending on vendor. Don't know what the English market looks like. Buying from the more recent runs is about $200 for the i5 model (midgrade, 4 cores, no hyperthreading, speed per core about the same as the i7) or $300 for the i7 (typically 4 cores + hyperthreading for 8 compute threads. The absolute latest released family is 6 cores. Gets speed increase if the task is very heavily multi-thread sensitive - games usually aren't, CAD might be.)

If you scrounge up a 960 to drop in that machine, it'll probably make things better for now but at some point you're going to be looking at exactly the same situation. That computer is functionally at the end of its upgrade paths. You'll get better results from saving what you need to do the full internal swap and get on a more modern motherboard, processor, and RAM.. at which point you can probably expect that new computer to give you another 8-10 years of reasonable service like that 920 did.

- Other questions:
750W is fine for a PSU, assuming the PSU is still healthy. If anything the power draw on major components has been trending down - your current CPU has a max rating of 130W. The new ones you would be looking at buying are generally 65 or 90W. Similar things going on with graphics cards.
You probably don't need a standalone sound card; those have become a niche market. The onboard hardware can handle most people's usages. A dedicated sound card is for either audiophile purposes (if you believe you can hear the difference in quality of processing.. the quality of your source file and your headphones or speakers probably matters more, tho) or for special use cases where the motherboard hardware doesn't have a needed feature - outputting in certain physical connections, sometimes trying to output in multi-channel surround, having multiple or unusual options for input connections other than the 3.5mm microphone jack. And even for some of those that might just mean you need to look for a 'media edition' or similar board where those options have been wired in.

[Aotrs Commander]

Well, if it's a Dell case you might need to replace it as well, yes. This is starting to sound like a pretty major job--you're getting a new case, motherboard, CPU and RAM, putting those together, then transplanting the drives, PSU and graphics card out of your old machine.

Unfortunately, yes.




Then there's a chance your Windows installation won't work on the new hardware, so you'd need to have a plan to reinstall it and your commonly-used applications in case the worst happened. Really not sure what to advise at this stage, especially since you say the machine is critical to your day job...I'd be inclined to maybe save up for an entire new machine so you can run the two in parallel for a while and gradually get the applications you use transferred over, rather than having to roll the dice on getting everything switched over and working in one go.

We've never had a problem swapping drives over before - so unless Win 10 is far more janky than Windows XP (as I only switched my primary OS to Win 7/10 about February/March 2016), I wouldn't especially expect that to be an issue.

An entire new machine is completely out of the question - the only time I was ever able to afford that was when my grandfather died and left me some money. I am just not going to be in a position where I will be able to do more than bit-and-bob (like I did before and since) and replace bits a few at a time... Or, apparently, in this case, a lot but not everything, at a time. I have a nominal computer fund set by in case of emergancies (like when something dies), but that's about as far as I can manage.

(And we simply don't have space for a second iron idiot.)




That computer is functionally at the end of its upgrade paths. You'll get better results from saving what you need to do the full internal swap and get on a more modern motherboard, processor, and RAM.. at which point you can probably expect that new computer to give you another 8-10 years of reasonable service like that 920 did.

Hmm, yeah, so we could be looking at something coming up to ten years old. So I'd rather pre-empt the problem (and then if things go wrong and I absolutely need the idiot, I have some back-ups we can go back to on hand instead of having to rush out and buy something hastily because I need the computr back immediately.) And yeah, I don't see a point in upgrading and half-doing the job.


- Other questions:
750W is fine for a PSU, assuming the PSU is still healthy. If anything the power draw on major components has been trending down - your current CPU has a max rating of 130W. The new ones you would be looking at buying are generally 65 or 90W. Similar things going on with graphics cards.
You probably don't need a standalone sound card; those have become a niche market. The onboard hardware can handle most people's usages. A dedicated sound card is for either audiophile purposes (if you believe you can hear the difference in quality of processing.. the quality of your source file and your headphones or speakers probably matters more, tho) or for special use cases where the motherboard hardware doesn't have a needed feature - outputting in certain physical connections, sometimes trying to output in multi-channel surround, having multiple or unusual options for input connections other than the 3.5mm microphone jack. And even for some of those that might just mean you need to look for a 'media edition' or similar board where those options have been wired in.

So noted.



So then. Assuming that I am going to need a new processor, motherboard and *sigh* RAM *shakes fist at Star Citizen* - and it may as well be 16GB, since most normal PCs don't come with three slots and there's no point having LESS than I do now - what sort of specific stuff am I looking at? I gather (assuming they're not bovine excrementing us) than AMD might be a better choice than Intel right now, but beyond that, I'm not sure what it is I should be looking at. The technical stuff on Amazon and Maplin is, I'm afraid, mostly meaningless to me because I'm utterly out of date (it was about 2005 the last time I actually bought my own computer, and before that, it was Dad paying for it). We're looking at something in the range of about £400 (plus case).

(Oh, a note worth making, since it's apparently considered a selling point - aethetics are meaingless. In fact, I'd prefer to actively avoid stuff with flashy lights or whatever and I don't care if it comes in horrible clashing colours or whatever. The PC sits out of sight below my desk and I don't need or want to see it. But apprently, this IS a factor for people, hence me mentioning it.)

[halfeye]

I don't think that processor is bad at all. You can get faster, but it has four cores with hyperthreading I presume from the i7 description, and there are i3s from a couple of years ago with two cores and hyperthreading that would work out slower.

I would go for a new graphics card, and maybe extra RAM.

If anyone's got reasons why I'm wrong on this, I'd be interested to know how and why I am wrong.

[Silfir]

I don't think that processor is bad at all. You can get faster, but it has four cores with hyperthreading I presume from the i7 description, and there are i3s from a couple of years ago with two cores and hyperthreading that would work out slower.

I would go for a new graphics card, and maybe extra RAM.

If anyone's got reasons why I'm wrong on this, I'd be interested to know how and why I am wrong.

Well, it's an old i7. I certainly wouldn't spend good money on RAM for it anymore.

For Total War: Warhammer specifically, it's definitely the weak link. The game is extremely CPU heavy (http://www.pcgamer.com/total-war-warhammer-benchmarks-strike-fear-into-cpus/), which isn't typical at all for AAA titles, but there you go. If you check the CPU benchmarks, you'll find that upgrading a GTX 950 (which is weaker than a GTX 760) all the way to a GTX 1080 leads to almost no fps increase at all for an i3-4360 if you're using DirectX 11, and it's barely better for DirectX 12, which takes some load off the CPU.

And before you mention that the i3-4360 is a dual-core and therefore overall slower than the i7-920, it's not that clear-cut (http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-920-vs-Intel-Core-i3-4360/1981vs2819). It's only if hyperthreading on four cores is fully utilized that the i7-920 can finish ahead, and while Total War: Warhammer appears to do that if you use DirectX 12, it's not enough to get the i7-920 out of the doghouse.

I think particularly with Aotrs Commander's preferences in mind (strategy games), a big CPU/motherboard/RAM upgrade does take precedence over a GPU or anything else.



The good news is that it's not a bad time to be upgrading CPUs at all. AMD is finally competitive with Intel again, so there's a bit of a technology race going on. Not only can you actually buy budget-priced AMD CPUs now without crippling yourself, Intel just upgraded their i3, i5, i7 line - i3s are now quad cores (sans HT though), i5s have six cores, and even basic i7s have six cores with hyperthreading.

Over the span of two years, a basic quad core of decent speed went from costing 180€ (i5-6500) to about 100€ (Ryzen 3 1200). Even if you look at Intel only, the price/performance improved dramatically (http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-6500-vs-Intel-Core-i3-8100/3513vs3942).

It is, unfortunately, a very bad time to be buying RAM. DDR4 RAM used to be about 35€ for 8 GB. It's now 80€. I'm not sure that's going to change anytime soon, either. So if you do the big platform change and upgrade, start by only getting 8 GB RAM for now. It's usually enough anyway.

(Sorry I'm not converting to British pounds - I could maybe do the math in my head, but I can't type the symbol, and I'm too lazy to copy/paste it.)

[factotum]

I don't think that processor is bad at all. You can get faster, but it has four cores with hyperthreading I presume from the i7 description, and there are i3s from a couple of years ago with two cores and hyperthreading that would work out slower.

The per-thread performance of an i7-920 is really not very good. My AMD Athlon 860K, which is garbage tier by today's standards, would beat it on both single threaded and multi-threaded performance, and a Ryzen 3 1200 would leave it in the dust.

@Aotrs Commander: the above-mentioned Ryzen 3 1200 is the bottom of the Ryzen range, but would still be a significant upgrade over what you have. Anything above that in the range would be better still. The 1200 goes for about £95--if you can stretch to £115 you'd get a Ryzen 3 1300X. Do not get the FX series processors that are in the same cost ballpark, they might have more cores but that's not likely to help you in a game, and their per-thread performance is lacking.

[Aotrs Commander]

I don't think that processor is bad at all.

It ain't, which is why I've not worried about it for a good number of years. But it does seems as if it's coming towards the end of it's usefulness.


The good news is that it's not a bad time to be upgrading CPUs at all. AMD is finally competitive with Intel again, so there's a bit of a technology race going on. Not only can you actually buy budget-priced AMD CPUs now without crippling yourself, Intel just upgraded their i3, i5, i7 line - i3s are now quad cores (sans HT though), i5s have six cores, and even basic i7s have six cores with hyperthreading.

Over the span of two years, a basic quad core of decent speed went from costing 180€ (i5-6500) to about 100€ (Ryzen 3 1200). Even if you look at Intel only, the price/performance improved dramatically (http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-6500-vs-Intel-Core-i3-8100/3513vs3942).

It is, unfortunately, a very bad time to be buying RAM. DDR4 RAM used to be about 35€ for 8 GB. It's now 80€. I'm not sure that's going to change anytime soon, either. So if you do the big platform change and upgrade, start by only getting 8 GB RAM for now. It's usually enough anyway.

(Sorry I'm not converting to British pounds - I could maybe do the math in my head, but I can't type the symbol, and I'm too lazy to copy/paste it.)

So noted. There is something to be said, maybe, for getting the processor and motherboard first and the RAM later and worrying about sticking it at some later point - we'll see.

(Heck, it's close enough now I work on "it might as well be the same, thanks Brexit...!")


The per-thread performance of an i7-920 is really not very good. My AMD Athlon 860K, which is garbage tier by today's standards, would beat it on both single threaded and multi-threaded performance, and a Ryzen 3 1200 would leave it in the dust.

@Aotrs Commander: the above-mentioned Ryzen 3 1200 is the bottom of the Ryzen range, but would still be a significant upgrade over what you have. Anything above that in the range would be better still. The 1200 goes for about £95--if you can stretch to £115 you'd get a Ryzen 3 1300X. Do not get the FX series processors that are in the same cost ballpark, they might have more cores but that's not likely to help you in a game, and their per-thread performance is lacking.

So sense scrimping for the sake of twenty quid if we're a-doin' this, so I've filed 1300X away. The next burnin' question then, is what does I put it on?

Specifically, stuff like will I need a network card (I can't even remember if I have one now), do I need to look how many USB sports they have (since I am using 3 currently and don't think my joystick is plugged in) and do I need to be concerned about what connections the two HDDs (primry and principally primary backup) and the DVD drive have? (The newest HDD and DVD are new, so I can just dig up my amazon order and find out what they are.) The information on Amazon, for example, is not always terribly informative (or I don't understand the abbreviations..!)

[Silfir]

Let's see...

No point in paying an extra 20 for the 1300X since the 1200 overclocks to the same amount, really. If you're going to put more money in, I'd actually highly recommend an R5 1600, or an R5 1400 at least. The extra cores and threads actually make a difference in Total War: Warhammer, and the trend skews towards more multi-threaded stuff, so if you plan on riding this one for as long as possible...

You want a B350 motherboard, I'd say. I don't think you need anything extra beyond that; it will likely have plenty of SATA and USB slots, and it has an inbuilt network card.

[Aotrs Commander]

Let's see...

No point in paying an extra 20 for the 1300X since the 1200 overclocks to the same amount, really. If you're going to put more money in, I'd actually highly recommend an R5 1600, or an R5 1400 at least. The extra cores and threads actually make a difference in Total War: Warhammer, and the trend skews towards more multi-threaded stuff, so if you plan on riding this one for as long as possible...

You want a B350 motherboard, I'd say. I don't think you need anything extra beyond that; it will likely have plenty of SATA and USB slots, and it has an inbuilt network card.

Thusingly? (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-Prime-B350-PLUS-S-ATA-Motherboard/dp/B06X9LN311)

Well, Amazon does give the R5 1600 5-stars, but it is also £70 more expensive than the aforementions 1300X, which is quite a fair bit more than £20 more than the basic 1300. (Looking on amazon, since that seems to be the cheapest and also I know if it goes wrong, they don't quibble.)



Edit: Ths RAM RAM (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-16GB-8GBx2-PC4-19200-288-Pin/dp/B019FRD5O6/ref=sr_1_3?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1515360216&sr=1-3&keywords=ram%2Bddr4&refinements=p_n_style_browse-bin%3A11416345031%2Cp_n_availability%3A419162031%2 Cp_n_feature_keywords_browse-bin%3A2914615031&th=1) plus aformentioned motherboard plus aforementioned processor (https://www.amazon.co.uk/AMD-Ryzen-1600-Desktop-CPU/dp/B06XNRQHG4/ref=sr_1_1?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1515359554&sr=1-1&keywords=AMD+Ryzen+5+1600) comes to almost exactly £400.

(My mate says that the RAM is expensive because all the buggers bit-coin farming or something, which strikes me as not something going to change in the near future. (And you can garentee anyway that whenever I bought some, it would only drop in price immediately afterwards...)


Edit edit: Ye gods, these days it's like pulling teeth, trying to get all this looked at! I just a basic, functional case! Like in the old days! A big metal box - preferrably with any fans necessary already attached - with which to put stuff in! I don't care what fracking colour it is, or whethr it has a window or silly glowing lights! I don't know what sodding or how many fans I need, if any! *skulldesk* I just wanna caaaaaase! *sobs*

I must seem like a right Luddite; but I'm a necromancer, not a computer technicial dammit...!

[halfeye]

Well, it's an old i7. I certainly wouldn't spend good money on RAM for it anymore.

I was doubtful about the RAM.

However, I have an Athlon (32 bit, one core) 1GHz that last I knew still ran Win 98 okay, so no, that i7 isn't old. :smallbiggrin:


For Total War: Warhammer specifically, it's definitely the weak link. The game is extremely CPU heavy (http://www.pcgamer.com/total-war-warhammer-benchmarks-strike-fear-into-cpus/), which isn't typical at all for AAA titles, but there you go.

I know nothing about that game.


If you check the CPU benchmarks, you'll find that upgrading a GTX 950 (which is weaker than a GTX 760) all the way to a GTX 1080 leads to almost no fps increase at all for an i3-4360 if you're using DirectX 11, and it's barely better for DirectX 12, which takes some load off the CPU.

I find that improbable, unless the CPU is really totally overwhelmed there ought to be some increase in performance with a better graphics card. Low resolutions do favour CPUs, but at higher resolutions it's all about the graphics card.


And before you mention that the i3-4360 is a dual-core and therefore overall slower than the i7-920, it's not that clear-cut (http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-920-vs-Intel-Core-i3-4360/1981vs2819). It's only if hyperthreading on four cores is fully utilized that the i7-920 can finish ahead, and while Total War: Warhammer appears to do that if you use DirectX 12, it's not enough to get the i7-920 out of the doghouse.

I'm not convinced, this is four real 2.67 GHz cores against two hyperthreaded 3.7 GHz, which ought to work out at 1.85 GHz per hyperthreaded core. I don't think Intel have been getting enough increases in instructions per clock to pull that back.

I'm all for multicore CPUs, OTOH I'm not keen on hyperthreading but that's just me.


I think particularly with Aotrs Commander's preferences in mind (strategy games), a big CPU/motherboard/RAM upgrade does take precedence over a GPU or anything else.

If the CPU takes precedence over the GPU you'll be forever stuck in low resolution. If you get a good GPU now, and upgrade the CPU etc later, you can move the card across, whereas if you upgrade the CPU etc now you'll be stuck with this GPU until you upgrade that.


The good news is that it's not a bad time to be upgrading CPUs at all. AMD is finally competitive with Intel again, so there's a bit of a technology race going on. Not only can you actually buy budget-priced AMD CPUs now without crippling yourself, Intel just upgraded their i3, i5, i7 line - i3s are now quad cores (sans HT though), i5s have six cores, and even basic i7s have six cores with hyperthreading.

It's a bad week to upgrade CPUs, maybe a bad month, but it'll probably be a good year to upgrade.

[factotum]

Edit edit: Ye gods, these days it's like pulling teeth, trying to get all this looked at! I just a basic, functional case! Like in the old days! A big metal box - preferrably with any fans necessary already attached - with which to put stuff in! I don't care what fracking colour it is, or whethr it has a window or silly glowing lights! I don't know what sodding or how many fans I need, if any! *skulldesk* I just wanna caaaaaase! *sobs*

I must seem like a right Luddite; but I'm a necromancer, not a computer technicial dammit...!

The motherboard you linked is an ATX motherboard, so just look for an ATX case that's reviewed as being simple to install stuff in. Really, really cheap cases should be avoided, because they're usually not well designed and have lots of lovely sharp edges you can cut your fingers to ribbons on while trying to jockey stuff into position. Just go for something that has a decent number of good reviews on Amazon, like say this one:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-CC-9011075-WW-Windowed-Mid-Tower-Computer/dp/B00RORBQNW/

[Excession]

Thusingly? (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Asus-Prime-B350-PLUS-S-ATA-Motherboard/dp/B06X9LN311)

Well, Amazon does give the R5 1600 5-stars, but it is also £70 more expensive than the aforementions 1300X, which is quite a fair bit more than £20 more than the basic 1300. (Looking on amazon, since that seems to be the cheapest and also I know if it goes wrong, they don't quibble.)

What connections do your hard drive and CD drive use? If they're ATA (the big ribbon cable, often grey) then you can't connect them to that motherboard. They're probably SATA (small cable, often red or yellow) then you're fine. I think based on timing you'll be fine, just something to be careful of in old machines.

One alternative may be to look for a second hand machine. I only know the NZ market, but sometimes you can get ex-business workstations for really good prices, and even a three-year old machine can be fine for modern games with just a new video card. CPU speeds stagnated for a while, and games are still generally designed around console CPU speeds anyway. There is a risk that the power supply in these machines can't run a big video card, but you have a good power supply already, and modern cards use less power than they used too anyway.

I can't help with finding places to buy these machines in the UK. In NZ there are specialist ex-business action houses, and PC retailers often re-sell machines as well. I guess you might start with eBay. Looking at ebay.co.uk briefly myself, I came two interesting items:

This (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-Optiplex-7010-SFF-3rd-Gen-Core-i5-3-4ghz-8GB-RAM-500GB-4xUSB3-Windows-10-/272873824314?_trksid=p2349526.m2548.l4275) is close to what I'm taking about. A 3.5GHz 3rd gen i5 would be fine for gaming; the only downside is it's a bit low on RAM and the small form factor case might make adding a video card impossible.

This item (https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Gaming-PC-Windows-10-Desktop-Computer-Quad-Core-i5-GTX-1050-Ti-16GB-RAM-1TB-HDD-/192194216668?_trksid=p2349526.m2548.l4275#viTabs_0 ), if correct (the fields haven't been filled out with much care is all) is a perfectly decent complete gaming machine for what you're talking about spending on just the CPU and motherboard upgrade. That company had other machines listed as well.

[Silfir]

Well, Amazon does give the R5 1600 5-stars, but it is also £70 more expensive than the aforementions 1300X, which is quite a fair bit more than £20 more than the basic 1300. (Looking on amazon, since that seems to be the cheapest and also I know if it goes wrong, they don't quibble.)

The R3 1300X is a quad core without hyperthreading equivalent. The R5 1600 has six cores and twelve hardware threads.

Keeping in mind that Total War: Warhammer is fairly CPU heavy, I think it would be worth doing, but it's entirely up to you.


I know nothing about that game.

Well, good thing I linked an article about it!




I find that improbable, unless the CPU is really totally overwhelmed there ought to be some increase in performance with a better graphics card. Low resolutions do favour CPUs, but at higher resolutions it's all about the graphics card.

An article about how Total War: Warhammer *is* a CPU-heavy game, to clarify. I suppose you're drawing different conclusions from looking at the benchmarks than I did.


I'm not convinced, this is four real 2.67 GHz cores against two hyperthreaded 3.7 GHz, which ought to work out at 1.85 GHz per hyperthreaded core. I don't think Intel have been getting enough increases in instructions per clock to pull that back.

At this point someone's going to have to reassure me that my ability to post links wasn't blocked somehow and they just don't appear for anyone else. What I tried to link to was a userbenchmark.com comparison of the i7-920 and the i3-4360 that concluded that the i3-4360 is about 50% faster single-core, 13% quadcore (i.e. if the i7-920's hyperthreading doesn't apply) and about 22% slower when all threads are maxed out. It's pretty close.


If the CPU takes precedence over the GPU you'll be forever stuck in low resolution. If you get a good GPU now, and upgrade the CPU etc later, you can move the card across, whereas if you upgrade the CPU etc now you'll be stuck with this GPU until you upgrade that.

Right, you want to upgrade both in the long run. It doesn't matter one bit which one you do first - after all, you can move the GTX 760 across just as easily as you could with a new GPU - aside from the fact that Total War: Warhammer is very CPU heavy, it appears to be the most demanding game that Aotrs is running at the moment, and the GTX 760 is still pretty good.






CPU speeds stagnated for a while, and games are still generally designed around console CPU speeds anyway.



Not Total War: Warhammer.

Why is Aotrs Commander buying cases or secondhand prebuilt PCs all of a sudden? The entire beauty of owning a PC is that you don't have to replace the entire thing when you need something upgraded.



P.S. Did I mention Total War: Warhammer is really CPU heavy?

[Excession]

Not Total War: Warhammer.
Fair point.


Why is Aotrs Commander buying cases or secondhand prebuilt PCs all of a sudden? The entire beauty of owning a PC is that you don't have to replace the entire thing when you need something upgraded.

I feel that when you're replacing CPU, motherboard, RAM, case, and maybe video card in the foreseeable future, that's not really an upgrade any more. The only things not changing there are drives and power supply. I think in this case second hand machines may give roughly the same end result for less money. As Aotrs Commander mentioned having a tight budget, I thought it was worth raising it as an option.

[halfeye]

Well, good thing I linked an article about it!

It's one game, and I found the article difficult to read. Myself, I play a few games at a time, and swap out one or another fairly often.


An article about how Total War: Warhammer *is* a CPU-heavy game, to clarify. I suppose you're drawing different conclusions from looking at the benchmarks than I did.

If there were benchmarks in the Total War article, I got bored before I got to them.


At this point someone's going to have to reassure me that my ability to post links wasn't blocked somehow and they just don't appear for anyone else. What I tried to link to was a userbenchmark.com comparison of the i7-920 and the i3-4360 that concluded that the i3-4360 is about 50% faster single-core, 13% quadcore (i.e. if the i7-920's hyperthreading doesn't apply) and about 22% slower when all threads are maxed out. It's pretty close.

What I saw for the non-Total War link looked like a seller's review page, of course they are going to boost the chip they can actually sell. It wasn't clear to me what user benchmarks mean, if it's opinions then yeah, people who are looking to buy new gear will deprecate their old stuff. There is no way that without overclocking that 2 core chip would be faster than a four core on a four core task, hyperthreading slows the cores down, it has too (basic thermodynamics, there is no perpetual motion machine).


Right, you want to upgrade both in the long run. It doesn't matter one bit which one you do first - after all, you can move the GTX 760 across just as easily as you could with a new GPU - aside from the fact that Total War: Warhammer is very CPU heavy, it appears to be the most demanding game that Aotrs is running at the moment, and the GTX 760 is still pretty good.

Yeah, it's looking better in comparisons than I was expecting, first site I looked at jumped from GTX750 to GTX780 :smallconfused:


Why is Aotrs Commander buying cases or secondhand prebuilt PCs all of a sudden? The entire beauty of owning a PC is that you don't have to replace the entire thing when you need something upgraded.

The case he has is a DELL, and they sometimes do interesting things. If it's ATX then that's probably still good, but there was a time when you couldn't upgrade Compaq, then, later, Dell.

[Aotrs Commander]

If the CPU takes precedence over the GPU you'll be forever stuck in low resolution. If you get a good GPU now, and upgrade the CPU etc later, you can move the card across, whereas if you upgrade the CPU etc now you'll be stuck with this GPU until you upgrade that.

If by "low resolution" you mean "1920 x 1080," that's fine. I have no need or desire to get 4K or whatever; I don't believe I have a single game currently installed that would care about higher than 1920x1080 anyway (and I'm still playing games for which it was hard enough to get to work in the more modern widescreen anyway "e.g. Emperor!") I really don't play graphics intensive games (I had to make a special effort to consider Star Citizen, the more fool me) - shooters and MMORPGs and whatnot simply don't fall into my chosen interest fields. And to be honest, we're sort of at the point where in a lot of cases, even modern "low" settings are good enough for me, really. (I mean, 20-year old games...! Or Pokémon.)

Total War (and probably Star Citizen where preportedly Squadron 42 comes out, and I'm increasingly less struck by that, since I signed up for More TIE Fighter, not FPS-with-stuff-on) are the first things in years I've even given pause to running (and even then it was only reading the thread about Total War 2 - and remembering Witcher 3's very high processor minimum spec - that made me think to look).


Yeah, it's looking better in comparisons than I was expecting, first site I looked at jumped from GTX750 to GTX780 :smallconfused:

I did manage to do some reasearch when I got it. At the time, it was considered extremely good for a mid-end card, very competative and the specific model I got was one of the best variants. But given that was £250, I can safely say if the rest of it is going to get upgraded, the GPU is emphatically NOT this year, unless I have to do an emergancy replacements because it suddenly fails. (And until it starts to fall below game minimum specs, I don't think it needs to.)

(As a secondary note - the GPU will have bugger-all effect on my actual, proper CAD work, but a processor/RAM upgrade may very well do.)




What connections do your hard drive and CD drive use? If they're ATA (the big ribbon cable, often grey) then you can't connect them to that motherboard. They're probably SATA (small cable, often red or yellow) then you're fine. I think based on timing you'll be fine, just something to be careful of in old machines.

Definitely SATA (I bought a 2TB drive last year and I just double-checked on Amazon).


One alternative may be to look for a second hand machine.

Eeh. You don't always know the history and if I'm going to spend money, I might as well try and do the job properly, rather than risk a second-hand one that fails a year or two down the line. (With the current one, Dad worked with the chap who was getting rid of it, so we knew it hadn't had much hammer.) From Amazon or somewhere, if it keels, I know I they don't quibble about stuff.

(The grim spectre of thought also occured to me as I drove back from panto practise that I should probably do this sooner rather than later, because if HMRC does decide NOT to give me my working tax credit back after we finish tussling over it, I would be better served to do it now, while I have the funds, rather than later. If I am forced to sign back on later this year if I deplete my reserves (a possibility, but I always try and consider the worst-case scenarios), then I may not get them up again for some time - and if something does suddenly fail...)



It also occurs that a processor upgrade stands some chance of speeding up the TBS or grand start games I play a lot (or at least reducing the late game lag), maybe even improve loading times, I dunno how that affects those things (and it's probably different game-to-game.

[Silfir]

It's one game, and I found the article difficult to read. Myself, I play a few games at a time, and swap out one or another fairly often.



If there were benchmarks in the Total War article, I got bored before I got to them.

Skip ahead to the relevant section and read that. It's what I did.

I'm not sure what else to say.


What I saw for the non-Total War link looked like a seller's review page, of course they are going to boost the chip they can actually sell. It wasn't clear to me what user benchmarks mean, if it's opinions then yeah, people who are looking to buy new gear will deprecate their old stuff. There is no way that without overclocking that 2 core chip would be faster than a four core on a four core task, hyperthreading slows the cores down, it has too (basic thermodynamics, there is no perpetual motion machine).

I'm similarly speechless here. I make claims, then I provide sources to my claims - and you openly admit you didn't read the sources or even understood what they were. What am I supposed to do here?

Userbenchmark.com collects benchmarking data provided by users - it has nothing to do with sellers. A benchmark is not an opinion; it's the act of measuring the speed at which a piece of computer hardware can perform certain tasks. It's data. Thanks to substantial sample size, userbenchmark.com provides quite reliable data on CPU performance.

If you have better data, I'm all ears.

(I'm not sure what you're confused about on the quad core speed comparison - the i3-4360's cores are about 50% faster than the i7-920's. If there are exactly four threads to calculate, it can take advantage of hyperthreading while the i7-920 can't. Of course hyperthreaded cores can't work on both threads at full speed - that's why the i3-4360 ends up only 10% ahead instead of 50%. It slows down, just not by enough to make up for the massive single core speed advantage.)

[tyckspoon]

It also occurs that a processor upgrade stands some chance of speeding up the TBS or grand start games I play a lot (or at least reducing the late game lag), maybe even improve loading times, I dunno how that affects those things (and it's probably different game-to-game.

Probably will improve processing speed in-game, since the vast majority of the delay in those kinds of games is in processing the actions of hundreds or thousands of AI-acting game elements at a time; they usually have relatively little graphical load and are unlikely to go faster with more GPU power (might be prettier, but prettier unit shaders still leaves you waiting for the game to shuffle a hundred AI units around the map.) If you're working primarily with older games, single-core processing speed is going to be almost all they care about; games that are aware of and able to use multi-threading with decent results are a relatively recent development.

Load time tends to be mainly influenced by hard-drive access speed, and secondarily by RAM and processor speed - the main delay there is getting all the game information off the disc and loading it into memory. RAM capacity and graphical memory helps in that it increases the amount of stuff that can be loaded at once and limits how frequently the game has to go back to the hard drive; a standard spinning-disk hard drive is frequently the slowest component in a modern computer, so stuff can only be done as quickly as the hard drive can provide it. A solid-state drive offers much higher input-output speeds, and is the recommended upgrade if you're mostly annoyed by load times.

[halfeye]

If by "low resolution" you mean "1920 x 1080," that's fine.

No, by low resolution I meant 640 x 400. I played on Atari ST with 320 x 200 (but on a good monitor, not a TV) so even that's a step up.


I have no need or desire to get 4K or whatever; I don't believe I have a single game currently installed that would care about higher than 1920x1080 anyway (and I'm still playing games for which it was hard enough to get to work in the more modern widescreen anyway "e.g. Emperor!") I really don't play graphics intensive games (I had to make a special effort to consider Star Citizen, the more fool me) - shooters and MMORPGs and whatnot simply don't fall into my chosen interest fields. And to be honest, we're sort of at the point where in a lot of cases, even modern "low" settings are good enough for me, really. (I mean, 20-year old games...! Or Pokémon.)

Yeah, I understand that, I'm playing Oblivion (elder scrolls 4) on UHD (3840 x 2160) (apparently, mainly for the benefit of movie buffs, 4k technically means 4096 x 2160 and nothing less/else), with enough graphics grunt (GTX 980) it's okay. Fallout 4 self selects 1080p, and it's probably right, it's grapically gorgeous at that resolution, anything less that runs at UHD is usually fine (Halflife 2, Deus ex human revolution). Skyrim will technically run at UHD, but it's got a very distracting "Level Up" in white text at somewhere near the middle of the lower right quarter of the screen, all the time, when most of the time I can't actually level up, so I run it at 2560 x 1440 instead, it might be tolerably good at UHD, but I just can't bear that distracting text.


I did manage to do some reasearch when I got it. At the time, it was considered extremely good for a mid-end card, very competative and the specific model I got was one of the best variants. But given that was £250, I can safely say if the rest of it is going to get upgraded, the GPU is emphatically NOT this year, unless I have to do an emergancy replacements because it suddenly fails. (And until it starts to fall below game minimum specs, I don't think it needs to.)

Yeah, seems like a good un. I didn't understand what it was, the 750 seemed weak.


It also occurs that a processor upgrade stands some chance of speeding up the TBS or grand start games I play a lot (or at least reducing the late game lag), maybe even improve loading times, I dunno how that affects those things (and it's probably different game-to-game.

For speedup get an SSD, they are interestingly faster, they need to be pretty big, "barely boots from it" really doesn't cut the mustard, but with a decent size they make a huge difference.


(I'm not sure what you're confused about on the quad core speed comparison - the i3-4360's cores are about 50% faster than the i7-920's. If there are exactly four threads to calculate, it can take advantage of hyperthreading while the i7-920 can't. Of course hyperthreaded cores can't work on both threads at full speed - that's why the i3-4360 ends up only 10% ahead instead of 50%. It slows down, just not by enough to make up for the massive single core speed advantage.)

Don't be silly, if all four cores are fully utilised, then the slowdown has to be at least fifty percent. That's thermodynamically required, unless Intel do have a solution to perpetual motion. If all four cores are not fully utilised, then there is spare capacity, which means the user, not the processor, is the bottleneck in that scenario.

[Silfir]

Don't be silly, if all four cores are fully utilised, then the slowdown has to be at least fifty percent. That's thermodynamically required, unless Intel do have a solution to perpetual motion. If all four cores are not fully utilised, then there is spare capacity, which means the user, not the processor, is the bottleneck in that scenario.

No software in the real world actually fully utilizes a core. Part of the core is usually doing nothing, and hyperthreading allows the core to dedicate resources that aren't doing anything to the second thread. Benchmarks are based on actual software, not hypothetical 100%-core-utilizing software; that's why they're useful.

[Excession]

Total War (and probably Star Citizen where preportedly Squadron 42 comes out, and I'm increasingly less struck by that, since I signed up for More TIE Fighter, not FPS-with-stuff-on) are the first things in years I've even given pause to running (and even then it was only reading the thread about Total War 2 - and remembering Witcher 3's very high processor minimum spec - that made me think to look).

I think we all felt the Star Citizen hype. At this point I'm not even sure that releasing the game is actually part of the business plan. They're making plenty of money without it.

You could check out Everspace as a (admittedly less ambitious) replacement that actually exists. Rebel Galaxy is also great fun. It's not full 3D movement, but the core gameplay of broadside duels is really fun. Both games would run fine on the machine you have.


Eeh. You don't always know the history and if I'm going to spend money, I might as well try and do the job properly, rather than risk a second-hand one that fails a year or two down the line. (With the current one, Dad worked with the chap who was getting rid of it, so we knew it hadn't had much hammer.) From Amazon or somewhere, if it keels, I know I they don't quibble about stuff.

I think I see your point. From one way of looking at it, you can't afford the risk so having less to spend makes it more expensive. Sorry for missing that aspect of the problem.

[Aotrs Commander]

Right, after consultation with my techies mates, they basically concurred with what the thread suggested.

So I've put in the order for that - just to show, I thik it was £4 cheaper than yesterday because frack knows (and yes, I dd have to go double-check I'd ordered the motherboard I intended and correct myself...!) But I could see the RAM running towards out of stock and the othe RAM was about £20 plus more expensive (and Crucial is a known brand and the ratings were good). I also found I'd got about 25% more pennies squirreled away than I thought I did, so I thought frack it, then, might as well do it now, rather than hang about in the hopes of getting a better deal tomorrow or something. (Now, with my luck, now there will be, but conversely, if I didn't, everything would have shot up later!)

After some debate, I also got the case suggested (though I ended up getting that from Maplin, since it was a Prime only on Amazon, but near as dammit the same price).

So about £450 all told, plus some extra for when I bribe my mates to actually do the building (we do not let the Bleakbane loose with electronics unless we have to, as we might screw it up. Actually, ESPECIALLY with this damn Dell case, which I wouldn't have dared do anything to, since it's so tight.) When that actually gets DONE is a matter for conjecture, but the stuff will be at hand.

An a pre-upgrade thorough back-up to both HDDs and the external and probably DVD and Flashdrive, because no, I am NOT paranoid enough when it comes to data preservation!

*tips helmet*

If I remember, I'll report back on how it goes...

[halfeye]

No software in the real world actually fully utilizes a core. Part of the core is usually doing nothing, and hyperthreading allows the core to dedicate resources that aren't doing anything to the second thread. Benchmarks are based on actual software, not hypothetical 100%-core-utilizing software; that's why they're useful.

That's still the i7 920 doing nothing a lot of the time while the i3 is busting a gut. There's no way that 20% faster on four cores is meaningful.

[factotum]

That's still the i7 920 doing nothing a lot of the time while the i3 is busting a gut. There's no way that 20% faster on four cores is meaningful.

Of course 20% faster is meaningful. It's the difference between 25 and 30 frames per second, and any gamer will tell you that's a noticeable margin.

[halfeye]

Of course 20% faster is meaningful. It's the difference between 25 and 30 frames per second, and any gamer will tell you that's a noticeable margin.

Sure, if it's real it's meaningful, I'm not at all convinced it's real. You have an i7 920 with four cores @ 2.66 GHz, and you have a an i3 with two cores @ 3.7 GHz, if enabling hyperthreading on the i7 920 improves things for the i7, where is the improvement coming from? It's not coming from the "extra" cores, those are only virtual. The improvement has to be coming from both processors being at their processing limit. If that's the case, then presumably the i7 920 was not as fully utilised as the i3 in the lower useage scenario, and if that's so, it wasn't a fair test.

I think I'm going to go for get an SSD as my suggestion for improvement, we know those are a huge advance.

[wumpus]

Just to make sure, you are storing/reading most of your data from an SSD? The machine is old enough that I'd guess it didn't have one when it was shipped (they should have been in steady use when 760s were available). This should be the biggest change possible (especially for AutoCAD, although I've seen at least one MMO (DDO: that certainly couldn't expect SSDs at launch) take so long to load the area that it disconnected on me.

The rest of your system appears pretty well balanced, meaning that you will likely have to replace everything (possibly excepting the power supply, but I'd replace that to because old fan bearings).

[Aotrs Commander]

Just to make sure, you are storing/reading most of your data from an SSD? The machine is old enough that I'd guess it didn't have one when it was shipped (they should have been in steady use when 760s were available). This should be the biggest change possible (especially for AutoCAD, although I've seen at least one MMO (DDO: that certainly couldn't expect SSDs at launch) take so long to load the area that it disconnected on me.

The rest of your system appears pretty well balanced, meaning that you will likely have to replace everything (possibly excepting the power supply, but I'd replace that to because old fan bearings).

I looked, but SSDs are/were waaaaaay too expensive for the size required (I have currently, a 2 TB drive) by, like, five times (and that's looking now, not in early 2016, when I bought my current one - I can't even SEE a 2 TB SSD on amazon from a quick look1.) The machine I'm upgrading did not come with the HDD, we simply moved our old one(s) into it, and when my XP drive FINALLY started to fail, we grudiingly moved entirely over to Win 7/10 on said new drive (whereas before, the secondary HDD was there with Win 7 solely for me to play modern games!)

HDD failure is our level A1 catastrophy (even with all my backups of various stripes), so the only time one EVER gets replaced is when it starts to fails - even WITH the secondary HDD (and I'm never not having two installed in a machine again) and the advances like Steam), it looses a good two days of reinstalling everything. As far as I'm concerned the HDD and the contents IS basically the PC; the other hardware is pretty much secondary.

The PSU is also not that old, I bought it in mid-2013 according to amazon (because the one that came with it was simply not sufficient to run everything) and its a sturdy Corsair 750W. So I would certanly hope it'll last a good while yet.

The advantage of PC is that I don't - shouldn't - HAVE to replace every component in one go, but can replace individual parts as they wear out/fail, and thus spread the cost over an extended period of time.



1And if you're thinking "surely you can't need all that much space, Bleakbane?" I currently have 660 GB on the primary and 650 of the secondary (1.2 TB) and that usage builds up steadily over time. (Because we have, never mind moderns games and such, the data of over 40 man-years between me and Dad of various stuff. So yes, yes I do!

[Silfir]

Nobody is suggesting replacing 2 TB of hard drive space with SSD space - it's to point out that even adding a 120 GB SSD (250 GB ones are the usual pick these days) and reinstalling your operating system on it, as well as your AutoCAD stuff and all the other basic programs, should go a long way towards making your PC more responsive and faster overall.

You don't realize how much time, across a day of everyday PC usage, you're spending on just waiting for the spinning metal inside your hard drives to spin to the right place, until you no longer have to wait at all. SSDs are not just faster, they're like... eight times faster.

Spinning metal HDD is still the go-to for bulk storage (backups, movies, media files, game installs of games you're not even playing), no question about it. But applications that you use nearly every day and that have to read from and write data to your main drive as part of what they do all of the time (including the OS) should be on an SSD.

[Fri]

Yes, SSD is amazingly a big improvement in your computer use. Basically what you're supposed to do is, get a small SSD (120 GB is a good suggestion), and just put windows in it, and some other things that you might to load fast (I put windows and my ffxiv installation in my ssd basically) and just keep all your documents and programs and whatnot in your normal hard disk. Believe me, it's an amazing improvement. You can just turn off and on your pc in a second.

[factotum]

Sure, if it's real it's meaningful, I'm not at all convinced it's real. You have an i7 920 with four cores @ 2.66 GHz, and you have a an i3 with two cores @ 3.7 GHz, if enabling hyperthreading on the i7 920 improves things for the i7, where is the improvement coming from?

The i3 in question is a more advanced CPU than the i7-920 and is capable of executing more instructions per clock cycle. You can't compare processors from different generations (or different manufacturers) on clock speed alone!

[Fri]

The i3 in question is a more advanced CPU than the i7-920 and is capable of executing more instructions per clock cycle. You can't compare processors from different generations (or different manufacturers) on clock speed alone!

Indeed, this is a trap that used to catch me as well. In my younger days, comparing pc hardware is much simpler, I used to only need to compare the amount of ram a gpu card have, for example, to decide which one I should buy. But then, it started to caught me off guard around... elder scroll oblivion era, I think when I had a gpu card that just by ram amount, it should be big enough to play oblivion, but apparently it can't do the pixel shader version or what was it. It gets more confusing later on, with especially on CPU. I honestly cut down all the nitty gritty comparison nowadays and just check various benchmark scores. It's much simpler and accurate for my purpose.

[snowblizz]

Yes, SSD is amazingly a big improvement in your computer use. Basically what you're supposed to do is, get a small SSD (120 GB is a good suggestion), and just put windows in it, and some other things that you might to load fast (I put windows and my ffxiv installation in my ssd basically) and just keep all your documents and programs and whatnot in your normal hard disk. Believe me, it's an amazing improvement. You can just turn off and on your pc in a second.

I agree with the SSD thing. Ofc you want to keep any highspec games on the SSD say like WH:TW, which is when you'll notice how small 120gb is. For a Win10 install, big everyday programs like CAD and the odd AAA game I'd say 256gb-ish.

For longterm storage of 40 man years worth of stuff you'd still use a HDD though.

[halfeye]

The i3 in question is a more advanced CPU than the i7-920 and is capable of executing more instructions per clock cycle. You can't compare processors from different generations (or different manufacturers) on clock speed alone!

I wasn't comparing them on clock speed. I pointed out that the i7 improved compared to the i3 when they were both fully stressed, so the difference at the lower stress level had to be due to the i7 actually doing less work, and being less stressed at that point. That's what I was saying, and would still say, is not a fair test. The i3 is plainly going to be faster at single threaded tasks, however for multithreaded tasks, the i7 just has more cores, so it ought to come out ahead, and fully stressed it does.


I agree with the SSD thing. Ofc you want to keep any highspec games on the SSD say like WH:TW, which is when you'll notice how small 120gb is. For a Win10 install, big everyday programs like CAD and the odd AAA game I'd say 256gb-ish.

For longterm storage of 40 man years worth of stuff you'd still use a HDD though.

I'd say 400GB to 512GB of SSD (I don't understand why there are sizes that vary that much, but it seems they do), you want everything that you're currently using on the SSD, the HDD is for what you were working on last week that you might get back to next week, and local backups in general (for work and/or important stuff you still need off-site backups).

[snowblizz]

I'd say 400GB to 512GB of SSD (I don't understand why there are sizes that vary that much, but it seems they do), you want everything that you're currently using on the SSD, the HDD is for what you were working on last week that you might get back to next week, and local backups in general (for work and/or important stuff you still need off-site backups).
I was going to but price kept being mentioned as an issue so I went for smallest practicable size IMO. 120 is too small to be effective for day to day use, use where you can hav esome large stuff hanging around. The around 500 segment already may be a bit pricy, though it varies with "quality", essentially the speed of the SSD (which compared to a HDD ofc is totally infetesmal)
.

[wumpus]

While I'd certainly recommend a ~256G (120-512 are good sizes as well) as a first choice,there are other options (although I should point out, should you decide to replace the entire computer, the SSD will almost certainly work in a computer built in the next 5 years or so. Few other upgrades that work in your current machine will do that).

Intel sells a 32G of Optane memory for roughly the same price: https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Optane-Memory-Module-MEMPEK1W032GAXT/dp/B06XSXX3NS/ (sorry, US search)

This simply sits in your system and caches hard drive accesses with Intel's latest and greatest memory technology (although the PCIe bus kills any real advantage between the fancy new memory and industry standard SLC), so it should do what you want (improve access to terabytes of hard drive space). I'd look for a setting to make it write-through (which might hurt performance a lot) or be even more paranoid about backups, the one sent for review quickly failed: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11210/the-intel-optane-memory-ssd-review-32gb-of-kaby-lake-caching

Also 2012 called, reminding everyone about SSD caching. Basically the same idea as above, although with SSDs. Note that as SSDs grew bigger this hasn't been needed, so expect any information on it to be old, and if it is available on your system (I think it was one of those things where if Intel includes the checkbox on your chipset, Microsoft allows the software to work. I don't want to know how that business works). Even if you go with the "moderate sized SSD", I would look at partitioning your SSD into a small cache (I think they only went up to 64GM) of "hard drive acceleration" and the rest for CAD+Windows+favorite games.

To be honest, I'm not sure you can cache more than one hard drive at a time (windows seems to think you are supposed to replace the computer instead of buying a new hard drive, or at least can't imagine replacing C:) but you can probably get all you need to accelerate on one drive.

Hope you know about this link: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/ (unfortunately I couldn't find the Intel part that way, thus the Amazon search).

[Aotrs Commander]

So, upgrade was completed this morning, with the only minor niggle being we need to get a 2.5 to 5.5 bracket to mount the card reader.

Turned out to have cost me a lot less than expected. I'd been talking to Nanny about it all (and all the concern about me getting it done now, in case I didn't get my tax credit back or whatever). While we were taking out for dinner on Thursday, I just conversationally said "yeah, me mate's coming to do the computer this Saturday, get it all out done and usted and whatnot," - and she decided she wanted to give me a contribution. So her, bless her, she gave me £250 towards it! I was a bit gobsmacked, really.

(And on top of that, this morning I ALSO received word from HMRC that, actually yes, the business that I do IS actually a business, so they had better give me my credit back, sorry, Mr Bleakbane, sir. Score one for the polite snotogram again...!)

So, while I'm not immediately going to do anything, the new case has room for up to FOUR HDDs, so I may at some point down the line consider adding a third as an SSD; and other replacement upgrades may now be at lats possible to consider as I - at least for another while! - am not going to be going catastrophically short of pennies now.



Hilariously, of course, not long after I made this thread, I found the campaign map inn Total Warhammer 1 was starting to get a bit laggy and jumpy. Upgrade? Not done crap to sort it out!

(To be fair, I only thought it might, since research shows that it is not a graphical issue, nor one with an obvious solution, aside from possibly being related to the number of armies (specifically, the number of player armies), which is a bit of a pain. Ho hum.)

I'm gonna go now and have five minutes on Crusader Kings II now and see if I can see any appreciable difference there...!

[factotum]

What did you actually go for as an upgrade, then? Inquiring minds want to know!

[Aotrs Commander]

The aforementioned Ryzan 5, the Asus B350-plus motherboard and 16gb of Corsair DDR4 RAM.

Apparently the case (a 100R)is Corsair, too.

My techie mate even said he'd learned something, since this has that new fangled U-something bios - the one that actualy looks like a proper screen with the mouse and actual graphics and temperatures and stuff. (As opposed to the old "looks lke 1980s" interface I'm more used to.



Hilariously (or not, since I was in a rather good mood anyway), it took three chone long set of calls to Microsoft support to get windows re-activated…! Nearly as long as it took my mate to do the upgrade.

Clearly, this is not uncommon, since I was guided to a department down to the error code…! (AFTER the first gentleman I spoke to, who called me from the MSsupport website's "call me back" feature trned out to be in the US office and gave me the number for the UK one!)

Still, I cannot fault either of the three gentlemen I spoke to (all Indian-sounding); polite, helpful (terribly apologetic) and actually knew what they were talking about.

(Now, I say that because over this side of the pond, we get SO MANY spam phone calls (and we're even ex-directory) from gentleman with Indian accents. You try to be polite when you answer the phone, because occasionally there is the occasional poor chap actually with something genuninely important to say, but (sadly) your trained reaction on hearing that is usually "oh, here we go...!" Or from places like Virgin outsourcing to India and folk who don't really know much more than how to recite the list of common customer problems they're given.)

In the end, the one chap generated me a new product key. He said they didn’t often do that, but because it was obviously a proper copy of windows (it was a 7 Home upgraded via the free options to 10, so I had the product key), and I was able to send the proof of the motherboard purchase, he made the effort. (From the sound of it, he wasn't even sure it would work!) Actually, I think he went and got permission from his manager, as he asked to to stay on the line to said manager afterwards. So for once, I could say that the customer service was very good. So I made sure to say "thank you very much" and say they had done a very satisfactory job (especially to the manager).

I did feel a sorry, though, that all three seemed so taken by surprise at my patience and the odd joke I cracked; poor chaps must be used to dealing with all sorts of obstreperous, impatient folk. (Again, the spam probably doesn't do the chaps actually doing a proper, competant job any favours at all.)

[factotum]

My techie mate even said he'd learned something, since this has that new fangled U-something bios - the one that actualy looks like a proper screen with the mouse and actual graphics and temperatures and stuff. (As opposed to the old "looks lke 1980s" interface I'm more used to.


Pretty sure I had a PC with a mouse-controlled BIOS setup back in the late 90s or early 2000s, they're not as new-fangled as you might think. UEFI (which I assume is what you're talking about) doesn't really define anything about what the BIOS UI looks like, though, it redefines how the whole thing works in terms of interfacing with the hardware and providing the boot sequence.

[Aotrs Commander]

Pretty sure I had a PC with a mouse-controlled BIOS setup back in the late 90s or early 2000s, they're not as new-fangled as you might think. UEFI (which I assume is what you're talking about) doesn't really define anything about what the BIOS UI looks like, though, it redefines how the whole thing works in terms of interfacing with the hardware and providing the boot sequence.

Aye, that's the badger!

Well, put it this way, having something that is basically this:

https://www.technorms.com/assets/ASUS-UEFI-BIOS-Utility.jpg

for the BIOS UI blew me away, given what I'm used to BIOS is keyboard-only, low-res text!

[Brookshw]

So having just upgraded my GPU after advice in another thread (thanks for the advice to those who made suggestions), I started looking at the rest of my components which I bought roughly 7 years ago. Might be time to do some more upgrading, and this thread seemed like a good place.

Currently I'm considering swapping my mobo and CPU. Currently running a sabertooth x58 (which has been terrific) and a i7 960 (pretty sure it was i7). The catch for me is that I don't want to go to Win 10, which is kinda limiting though I guess Ryzen might be an option. In retrospect I'm impressed how well this has stood up over the years.

Anyone have any thoughts to offer? Constraints are I'd like to keep it under $700 ($500-$600 would be ideal) and Win 7 compatible.

Or am I crazy not to switch to 10 and am gimping myself for years to come?

Tangentially, I note a lot of people recommending SSDs, my understanding of them is their lifespan is notably shorter than a standard drive. Anyone have experiences in that regard?

[factotum]

Not switching to Win7 is going to be dangerous in the long run, yes, because there will be no security patches released for it. It's also possible that incompatibilities will creep in--for instance, there was a game called Starpoint Gemini 2 a few years ago where the developers had to release a special version for people still running Windows Vista because the mainline Win7 code wouldn't work on that OS.

As for CPU, an i7-960 is a bit porkier than the i7-920 mentioned in the OP, so you'd need to upgrade to a slightly better CPU to make it a worthwhile upgrade. You would still need to swap out your RAM, though, because you're still on DDR3 and all modern CPUs use DDR4. I'm not an expert on American dollar pricing for these things, though, so I'm not sure what your $700 budget actually buys you.

[Max_Killjoy]

The switch to SSD, full or partial, makes a remarkable difference.

As for Windows, I'd go with 7 Pro, and then be careful to avoid the telemetry (ie, Microsoft's spyware) installs when going through all the updates.

[halfeye]

The switch to SSD, full or partial, makes a remarkable difference.

Yeah, this is true, if you're just upgrading an old system you can't use the m2 sort, which can be faster, but most of the SATA SSDs will also make a huge positive improvement (there could concievably be some that don't, but (except for ones that are too small to make a difference) I don't know of any).


As for Windows, I'd go with 7 Pro,

Do you do anything special to get scrollwheels on mice working? because mine doesn't, it's not the mice - I've tryed several, and it's not the motherboard, in the UEFI BIOS scrolling works fine, so it pretty much has to be Windows.


and then be careful to avoid the telemetry (ie, Microsoft's spyware) installs when going through all the updates.

Sounds good, but how does one do that?

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah, this is true, if you're just upgrading an old system you can't use the m2 sort, which can be faster, but most of the SATA SSDs will also make a huge positive improvement (there could concievably be some that don't, but (except for ones that are too small to make a difference) I don't know of any).


The biggest bottleneck on an HDD is physically getting the right spot on the platter under the read head. A SATA SSD is still a major upgrade over a SATA HDD.




Do you do anything special to get scrollwheels on mice working? because mine doesn't, it's not the mice - I've tryed several, and it's not the motherboard, in the UEFI BIOS scrolling works fine, so it pretty much has to be Windows.


I've never come across that issue, even my old Win2k Pro system would take a scrollwheel mouse without trouble.




Sounds good, but how does one do that?


To the right, for each update, you can click on a link to the lower right called "more information" to see what the update does.

https://www.google.com/search?q=which+updates+install+telemetry+in+window s+7

[halfeye]

The biggest bottleneck on an HDD is physically getting the right spot on the platter under the read head. A SATA SSD is still a major upgrade over a SATA HDD.

I agree.


I've never come across that issue, even my old Win2k Pro system would take a scrollwheel mouse without trouble.

Oh. I guess a reinstall may be in order, I can't think why it failed. This older system with Win 7 (Home Pro?) is fine in that respect, they both have a lot of USB stuff going on, but the old one doesn't have a problem, so it's hard to see why the newer one would.


To the right, for each update, you can click on a link to the lower right called "more information" to see what the update does.

https://www.google.com/search?q=which+updates+install+telemetry+in+window s+7

That may be true, but there are hundreds of them when you first begin.