Greatest Performance Increasing Upgrade?

[Xab]

I am wanting to upgrade the performance of my system, but I am not sure where to begin. Can anyone give me your opinions of the single upgrade that will provide me with the greatest speed boost? I will list my system specs.

Gigabyte GA-8SG667 motherboard
Pentium 4 2.53Ghz (533 Mhz bus)
1GB PC3200 DDR 400 RAM (not in dual channel)
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Seagate Cheetah X15 (first generation) Main drive
Twin WD1200JB Storage drives
Soundblaster Audigy
Adaptec 19160 SCSI controller


Any suggestions would be much appreciated! Thanks

 

[Ilmater]

My opinion? Don't upgrade. No matter how much you upgrade at this point, you'll be disappointed. If I were you, I'd overclock that CPU some. You're obviously not maxing out that memory, so push it a little farther. As I don't know anything about Intel, someone else will have to tell you if your motherboard is good at overclocking.

 

[dullard]

What are you doing with it? I can see many possible answers. For example if you really need a fast drive, ditch the first generation Cheetah - you could get a good 20% to 30% faster drive. If you really want to run games fast, get a better video card. If you really need number crunching, pop in a new CPU...

However as said above, you really won't be very happy with any single improvement. 20% or so is probably what you'd expect by putting in the top of the line - and that is only on programs where the part you replaced was the limiting factor (expect <5% improvement on the rest of the programs). As a general rule it takes 10% difference just to even notice. So 20% is very small.

 

[Schadenfroh]

uhh, you dont need to upgrade something that powerfull

 

[Sid59]

agreed above. try and get 200MHZ FSB on that puppy.

 

[Ilmater]

Originally posted by: Sid59
agreed above. try and get 200MHZ FSB on that puppy.

Anandtech was only able to get 150MHZ out of it, but good luck. If you're going to change anything, I'd change the board.

 

[Compddd]

CPU!

 

[T9D]

..

 

[Xab]

Yeah I was deciding between a new 15.3k Cheetah or a 800mhz FSB CPU, I think I just might go with the hard drive.

 

[AgaBoogaBoo]

Originally posted by: Xab
Yeah I was deciding between a new 15.3k Cheetah or a 800mhz FSB CPU, I think I just might go with the hard drive.

I'd go with a 2.8C personally IMO and a dual channel motherboard because that drive is fast enough already. What do you plan to do with it?

If you listen to a lot of audio, and Audigy 2 and new speakers wouldn't hurt. What monitor do you have?

 

[sharkeeper]

This

Even with a single drive, using adaptive read aheads, write back caching, and cached i/o's will improve the performance of the system dramatically! The SCSI card you're using is holding you way back! Those Adaptecs are very slow IME.

-DAK-

 

[SnowBoarder9455]

Well thats a terrible computer! You definately need:

4 raptors in dual Raid 0, A 3.0C with water cooling overclocked to 4.4ghz, an FX 5900 ULTRA, and 4 gigs of PC-3700, 2x22" LCD's, that would be an improvement for anyone

Or you could live with it, cuz its fine, and wait for Prescott, which would be an improvement (Hopefully)

If you don't want that, I'd go for a 800 FSB cpu, any of them will be faster, expecially on an overclocking board (Abit's IC7-G or the top end gigabyte board), a 3.0C overclocked can go 4ghz+ I think.

S

Kevin