Small upgrade recommendations?

[delmontebanana]

Hi all,

My system's slowing down a bit, but it could be due to the fact I haven't reformated for a year or more now Nevertheless I wanted to get some ideas on what parts I should upgrade with a budget of around to spend £100-200 ($150-300USD)

Information:
1. I use my system for gaming, daily internet use and business use
2. £100-200 ($150-300USD) maybe a bit more
3. Country of residence UK
4. My system details:
ABIT Fatality FP-IN9 650i-SLI
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66Mhz, 800FSB
Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB
2 x 2GB GeiL DDR800 Ram
1 x 750 GB Sata HD (Samsung brand)
1 x 70GB IDE (Maxtor)
700 Watt PSU (branded)

My initial thought is to replace my IDE HD which I think maybe causing the bottleneck (it's used as a slave drive) with a 1.5tb sata drive as my main and the 750gb as a slave.

Should I be changing my CPU also or should I up the RAM?

 

[Maverick2002]

Which drive is your OS/app drive? You only listed a 70gb and a 750g drive .. no sata drive? You will want your OS/app drive to be the fastest it can be. The latest generation of 2 platter drives do a pretty good job of this. Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB has 3 platters and with a 32mb cache it's pretty faster. Alternately you can opt for VelociRaptor for your OS/app drive (my recommendation). That would probably be your best bet given your system. Are you overclocking the CPU at all? Also, 4GB is enough for most people, but bumping up to 8GB may give you a boost too - but that all depends on how much multitasking you do.

 

[delmontebanana]

Apologies.

the 750GB is a SATA2 and the main OS/APP, the 70GB is an IDE and just a spare storage drive.

The CPU isn't overclocked and I'm not a big fan of overclocking CPU's (bad experience long story ).

Thanks for the input anyway.

 

[Maverick2002]

I'd say get a Raptor. If you could resell your graphics card or CPU (or both) you could potentially upgrade both, though I'm not sure if your board supports 1333fsb.

 

[philosofool]

Well, that system is looking pretty up to spec. Plenty of RAM. Decent processor (What's the L2 cache?) Great video card.

Step 1: When was the last time you defragmented your HDD? You should do that if you haven't lately. It's worthwhile run disk clean up and delete any files that are just taking up space before you do that because the results of defraging will be better.

Step 2: If that didn't solve the issue, back up all your user data and reinstall the OS.

Step 3: If that didn't solve the problem, start thinking about ways to spend some money.

 

[philosofool]

Originally posted by: philosofool
Well, that system is looking pretty up to spec. Plenty of RAM. Decent processor (What's the L2 cache?) Great video card.

Step 1: When was the last time you defragmented your HDD? You should do that if you haven't lately. It's worthwhile run disk clean up and delete any files that are just taking up space before you do that because the results of defraging will be better.

Step 2: If that didn't solve the issue, back up all your user data and reinstall the OS.

Step 3: If that didn't solve the problem, start thinking about ways to spend some money.

Of course, if you reach step 3, or you just want to spend a little money to make your computer faster, I would get a new motherboard and processor. Right now, AMD is probably the way to go with your budget. The Phenom II X3 720 is a $120 triple core processor that is probably the best price/performance processor out there right now. Couple that with a 770 or 790 chipset from AMD and you have a nice $200-$250 upgrade.

 

[delmontebanana]

Thanks for the all the tips guys

In the end I decided to upgrade the HD first (as I found an offer to good to refuse!), going for the Samsung F3 1TB.
Having reformated and now using the F3 as my primary HD and removing the IDE HD, things are a lot smoother.

Although the greed has got to me and I'm on hunting for some decent RAM upgrade now...

My first thoughts were to either

a.) Buy 2 x 1GB GEiL to make up a total of 4GB
b.) Buy 2 x 2GB anymake and replace the original to make up a total of 4GB
c.) Buy 2 x 2GB GEiL and add to the original to make up a total of 6GB.

Any suggestions again?

 

[gwarren007]

If you are running a 32bit OS you can build up to 4gb, anything else is wasted. If you are running a 64bit OS then you can build as much as you want.

 

[betasub]

OP already lists 2 x 2GB GeiL DDR(2)-800, so more RAM may not be necessary. Of course, we're still in the dark re: OS and apps/usage, so it's all guesswork.

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66Mhz, 800FSB

Doesn't add up: 2.66GHz isn't on an 800FSB. What is the CPU model number (e.g. E6600)?