Unimpressed with all this new hardware

[BoboKatt]

What jump in hardware and/or technology gave you your biggest noticeable increase in performance that you can remember? I don?t know about you all, but over the last few years going from Celerons, to single core AMD to dual core X2?s, to new Intel Core, to quad core and now the newer 45nm chips? although I have seen a definite increase in performance overall in benchmarking and most importantly for me, video encoding etc?. I still don?t see a major HUGE, monumental increase in noticeable everyday performance where my jaw drops as WinXP loads in half a second, or loading and playing around with 8GB files is a joke?

The first time that I can remember when I actually saw an earth-shattering increase in noticeable ?snappiness?, speed and overall performance I think was when I went from like 1 MEG of RAM to 8 way way way back in Win 3.1. Then the other biggest jump period was when I finally decided to dump my old 30 GB IDE Fujitsu HD and get a new 250 GB SATA drive. Above all other upgrades I have done in the last years, from single cores to overclocked q9550? that had to be the best.

I am not saying I am disappointed lately with all this new hardware that keeps coming out? it?s just not much to get excited about. I am hoping maybe these new Intel SSD drives might give me that extra ?push? to be excited again. Something I can really say with conviction that I can see a dramatic increase in the way I can run 15 apps, or load huge files to work with etc..

I mean how much faster can a quad core get? How much RAM can you cram in your system when it?s just so cheap and really anything over 4GB wont do much for you. How much better is one new $600 video card over the latest generation when the older one would still do 100 frames a second?

Newer and faster HD are coming out, but honestly whether I have a 640 WD or a 1TB Samsung, I can?t tell the difference in how they load my games, or allow me to copy huge archives from one to the other. I am sure if I was to sit there and measure there might be a 1 second difference, but I would never notice it really.

What are your thoughts? What do we have to look forward to that will honestly make every hardware junky just stand up and cheer?

 

[myocardia]

If you're not impressed with the new hardware, don't buy it.

 

[GundamF91]

+1 on this.

We're hitting a curve where human perception starts to become indifferent to general day-to-day computing experience since things are very fast nowadays. There's still a major bottleneck in the days of Gigahertz and multicores, and that's I/O. CPU and Memory will sit empty if there's nothing coming from the data storage. For example, hard drive would be where things could improve so it can feed to CPU better, ie. multiple data paths to feed multiple cores at the same time. Another thing that I can still appreciate is faster internet, but I feel the instant I'm on a slower network, but that's more dependent on external factors rather than your local system. Also I think GPU hasn't hit that indifference yet, only because game designs continue to throw bigger and bigger meshes and textures at it, and all that create performance hits. Although I've also known giant Excel worksheets that could choke a even high performing system........but for the average user, it's down to synthetic benches scoring.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: myocardia
If you're not impressed with the new hardware, don't buy it.

:thumbsup:

It's not the supplier's job to make the hardware useful to you (OP)...you have to have a need for the hardware. Their job is just to provide you with the opportunity to buy the hardware.

Sure the sales team will always have their "shove and stuff" type individuals who want to shove a 3GHz computer into every 8month old baby's arms just so they can connive $1k from the parents bank account...but really who's to blame when that happens? Fools and their money are quick to part ways.

Some folks around here should try to not boast so loudly of being duped into buying hardware that they didn't need

At any rate rest assured there are plenty of folks who do find today's computers to be substantially faster for their purposes than the computer they had 2-3 years ago. I for one look forward to my 12GHz 24-core 22nm-based Haswell in 2013.

 

[21stHermit]

Originally posted by: BoboKatt
What jump in hardware and/or technology gave you your biggest noticeable increase in performance that you can remember?

That's Easy!!!

In ~1992 I went from a 386 to a low end 486 with a hybrid ISA video bus, PCI came out a year later. I was making a map in CorelDraw. To view my work, CD had a print preview function. On the 386 it took 80-sec for the map to draw on the screen. The 486 did it in 4-sec. WOW

That 486 was a Gateway and I paid ~$1500. All subsequent PC's I've had were so fast I couldn't time the screen draw and I'm loath to pay more than $500 for an upgrade.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: GundamF91
+1 on this.

Then tell us all why you felt the need to buy a Q9450, then overclock it to 3.6 Ghz.

Originally posted by: Idontcare
I for one look forward to my 12GHz 24-core 22nm-based Haswell in 2013.

You too? BTW, I'll definitely be overclocking mine. I'm hoping to get one of the steppings that people are getting ~18Ghz with.

 

[nevbie]

If you buy new hardware rarely enough, you will always get impressed after buying.

I think we will still see great improvement when it comes to heat/noise/power consumption. Information doesn't weight much.. and we shouldn't need this much energy to carry it. I wonder if speed of light sets a limit to overclocking, though.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Originally posted by: 21stHermit

Originally posted by: BoboKatt
What jump in hardware and/or technology gave you your biggest noticeable increase in performance that you can remember?

That's Easy!!!

In ~1992 I went from a 386 to a low end 486 with a hybrid ISA video bus, PCI came out a year later. I was making a map in CorelDraw. To view my work, CD had a print preview function. On the 386 it took 80-sec for the map to draw on the screen. The 486 did it in 4-sec. WOW

That 486 was a Gateway and I paid ~$1500. All subsequent PC's I've had were so fast I couldn't time the screen draw and I'm loath to pay more than $500 for an upgrade.

That Gateway -- the 486 -- did you get the full-tower job? I had that box. I wish I'd saved the case -- I could've modified the motherboard pan for ATX with a 6-32 drill-and-tap kit. I don't know why I was so clueless about drill-and-tap kits six years ago -- nobody told me, either. I was just sitting there one day, and it came to me: "Gee! I could ATX my old cases with a drill-and-tap kit!"

 

[plion]

overpriced compaq p166mhz 24mb ram to a dell p3 800 512mb ram. wow. That sweet box got me through most games in the late 90's and still runs today even the fans.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

its not economical for the industry to release HUGE LEAPS in performance. think about it, they are ALL looking to make a profit. and they will not profit by giving u that huge performance. they might in the short run, but why do that if they can give u just enough performance boost to have most people want to buy the slightly-faster pc? its all about profits

 

[exar333]

Originally posted by: nevbie
If you buy new hardware rarely enough, you will always get impressed after buying.

I think we will still see great improvement when it comes to heat/noise/power consumption. Information doesn't weight much.. and we shouldn't need this much energy to carry it. I wonder if speed of light sets a limit to overclocking, though.

QFT - this is exactly what I was thinking. Boy would would I be impressed if I was still using an old P4 1.8 Williamette (I use the term "P4" here loosely...) and I just upgraded to pretty much any single, dual, or quad-core on the market today. If you upgrade regularly, you won't see amazing jumps.

It also comes down to exactly what you use your computer for. I would be will to bet there were a lot of people that were extremely excited when the X2 and (later) Core2 processors came out if they used them for encoding and/or other tasks that greatly benefit from 2+ cores.

Just my $0.02.

 

[Munky]

I don't know about you, but when I upgrade from my Opteron to a Nehalem, I'm pretty sure I'll notice the difference.

 

[Markfw]

It depends on what you are going. bringing up XP is mostly disk intensive. If you were to get a 5 disk SCSI 320 Raid0 array of 15k drives, or a ramdisk, you would see a great increase in speed.

 

[PeteRoy]

The hard drive bottleneck is getting more and more obvious, the GPU, CPU, and memory all increase in speed, but hard drives remain as slow as they were 10 years ago.

 

[ashishmishra]

My biggest increase came in 2005 when I upgraded from a P4 1.5 Williamette/512MB/40GB/FX5200 to an Athlon 64 3500+/1GB/250GB/Geforce 6800

 

[RussianSensation]

Originally posted by: BoboKatt
What jump in hardware and/or technology gave you your biggest noticeable increase in performance that you can remember? I don?t know about you all, but over the last few years going from Celerons, to single core AMD to dual core X2?s, to new Intel Core, to quad core and now the newer 45nm chips? although I have seen a definite increase in performance overall in benchmarking and most importantly for me, video encoding etc?. I still don?t see a major HUGE, monumental increase in noticeable everyday performance where my jaw drops as WinXP loads in half a second, or loading and playing around with 8GB files is a joke?

That's not a surprise. By far, the area that needs the greatest innovation is storage. At the end of the day, gaming aside, your computer is only as fast as the slowest component in it - the hard drive.

That's why it's crucial that we have SSD at reasonable prices for 0.1ms access times

The greatest increase for me came in August of 2001:

From P2 233mhz 32mb of ram 2mb onboard video, 56k modem and 4GB hard drive Windows 98 to

AXP 1600+ 1.4ghz, 512mb of ram, Radeon 8500 64mb, DSL internet, 80GB WD, and Windows XP.

- The previous system took 2 min and 45 seconds to load ICQ at the time and the new Athlon took about 8 sec!!!
- I went from not being able to play any basic game to playing Medal of Honor with everything on high
- The downloading times for files went down from hours (we are talking 5-6 hours) to 10-15 minutes

I used to go downstairs make a cup of coffee come back up and ICQ was still loading. So think about it how much difference is there between loading MSN today in 0.1 seconds or in 1 second? My time is valuable, don't get me wrong, but I can wait 1 second. Back then...well that was quite the difference hehe Problem is the other day I had to use my friend's XP1700+ 512mb of ram XP and I was "snapping" about how slow it was for every day windows xp tasks. So keep in mind that if you were to go back to that older hardware you'd notice the difference immediately!

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: PeteRoy
The hard drive bottleneck is getting more and more obvious, the GPU, CPU, and memory all increase in speed, but hard drives remain as slow as they were 10 years ago.

Hard drives are more than 5x as fast today as they were 10 years ago. A $100 drive from today will outperform a top of the line SCSI setup from 10 years ago. Sure, they're still too slow, but even if you owned RAID 0 Intel SSD's, they would still be the bottleneck of the system.

 

[gramboh]

Originally posted by: BoboKatt
The first time that I can remember when I actually saw an earth-shattering increase in noticeable ?snappiness?, speed and overall performance I think was when I went from like 1 MEG of RAM to 8 way way way back in Win 3.1. Then the other biggest jump period was when I finally decided to dump my old 30 GB IDE Fujitsu HD and get a new 250 GB SATA drive. Above all other upgrades I have done in the last years, from single cores to overclocked q9550? that had to be the best.

I think part of it is the fact that you've kept pace with CPUs (A64 > X2> Core 2 > C2Q > yorkfield). Whereas going from a 30GB IDE to a 250GB SATA is skipping many years/generations so you will see a bigger jump. If you had gone A64 -> Yorkfield you would've felt the same thing. For me, I usually do a total rebuild every 3 years. I went from an Athlon 1200 @ 1400 TBird w/ TNT then GF2 GTS with 512MB to a P4C 2.6 @ 3.2 w/ 1GB 9800 then 6800GS then an E6600 @ 3.2, 2GB, 8800GTS640 (and recently dropped a Q6700/GTX280 in it). For me I see a huge increase from PC to PC because I wait years before changing anything. Although on this build I dropped a new GPU/CPU after only 1.5 years due to feeling the itch .

As for upcoming hardware, Nehalem is exciting for me. Pretty satisfied on the GPU front for now.

 

[21stHermit]

Originally posted by: BonzaiDuck
That Gateway -- the 486 -- did you get the full-tower job? I had that box.

Yep, full tower with a 5.25 floppy and what a dinosaur too.

Heavy with a U-shaped top. Everything screwed in, no quick clips like modern cases. Except for the 20X speed improvement vs. the 386, not at all sorry to see it gone.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

The case was solid. Even the plastic parts on those Gateways had more class than their IBM-beige brethren.

I still have one left -- from a Pentium "overdrive" 160, (replacing the original Pentium 100), which I purchased in 1995. Even it needed slight modification to be mobo-pan "ATX" compatible. I used it for my Prescott system. The problem with both: the cases were tall and wide, but not deep enough.

So -- yeah -- I still regret hauling that 486 case to the junkyard back in 2003. It still had "sheet-metal-work" mod potential.

For those complaining about incremental improvements. Someone mentioned a human trait -- that we quickly get used to the speed of some mechanical possession, and begin to see it as "slow." Very true.

That being said, I have this ASUS P4T533-R system with 32-bit, 232-pin PC-4000 RAMBUS (1-GB, and absurdly expensive). I built that machine in early 2003, and it's doing quite well as a file-server with a HighPoint RAID5.

It's a pretty sound basis of comparison -- a KVM-switch toggle away from this insanely overclocked E8600.

Folks, I havta tellya -- things have come a long way. We just don't notice it.

That Gateway 486 -- I think it originally came with 16 MB of RAM, and I "upgraded" it to 64 MB. That was 1993 or 1994.

14 years earlier, I was running SAS and SPSS statistical analyses on the DHEW "Data-Management-Center's" IBM-370. We were hauling punch-cards across the street to the HEW North Building on Independence Ave, where we had to stand in line at a counter. The SAS programming was sandwiched between IBM JCL.

That machine had 10 MB of RAM, shared by a government department with several thousand employees.

 

[Mango1970]

I love seeing folks remembering their old junker of a pc so fondly. Buying my first computer on my own 286 with (I cant remember the amount of RAM) 10MB of HD and a CGA monitor... the jump FINALLY to a Pentium 60 to them a freaking pentium 2 233 was stuff of dreams. The funny thing is all we ever did to convince ourselves was to run Wintune. Anyone remember that benchmark? I remember loving to see the "mips" I could generate. I remember dropping large coin eventually for a matrox card (cant even remember what it was exactly but EVERYONE had to have one) and I doubt anyone remembers their "number 9 video cards" which were all the rage. Also playing Quake back in the day... how can anyone forget finally getting their hands on 2 Voodoo cards in SLI. That was the stuff of dreams... something so tangible. Pretty much anything now, right down to the basic buget system you can buy at BestBuy will open Word, Outlook, music and surf at the same speed of a $4000 dream system. Not much change there.

As others have said... yup... if you upgrade the whole lot every 3 or 4 years you will faint at the performance dif. Upgrade every 6 months and not so much -- however... HD's (and I dont care how fast they have gotten from older gen ones) are still shite -- compared to how fast your CPU/GPU/RAM runs.

 

[TuxDave]

2GB of RAM on Vista --> 4GB of RAM on Vista

HUUUUUGE improvement omg....

 

[WaitingForNehalem]

Hopefully I'll notice a difference from my P4 to Nehalem. I will finally be able to multitask!

 

[Tempered81]

Originally posted by: myocardia
If you're not impressed with the new hardware, don't buy it.

:light:

 

[bobsmith1492]

The latest big jump I had was adding 4GB more so I'm up to 6GB now. This is on Vista 64-bit.

Everything is in RAM - EVERYTHING. Everything loads instantly. I built this computer 2 years ago, too; along with a new video card, it feels brand new again.

Originally posted by: TuxDave
2GB of RAM on Vista --> 4GB of RAM on Vista

HUUUUUGE improvement omg....