Dissapointed with Upgrade

RichD

Hi Guys,

I have recently upgraded my PC and I have to say it didn't have as much of an impact as I would have expected. I cant remeber the exact models of parts but there is a rough before and after below.

Before:
Asus A7NX8-E
AMD Athlon 2800 with Barton
1GB Kingston HyperX RAM 400 DDR(2x512 matched pair)
ATI Radeon 9600
Seagate Barracuda SATA HD. (Not sure of access speeds)

After
Gigabyte S3 Series MB (cant remember the model)
AMD Athlon x2 64
2GB Crucial Balistix RAM 800(2x1GB)
ATI Radeon X1950
the same SATA hard Disk

I have upgraded to Vista 32bit as well so I cant work out if Vista is more resource intensive and that has cancelled out the increased performance or if my old hard disk could be slowing things down. I must admit it does run Bioshock on max graphics but I cant run STALKER on max.

I have tested the memory and that is running at about 405 which is correct (slightly over clocked) as it is DDR.

Are there any benchmark tools I can use to test my performance and see if there is anything holding my system back?

Cheers

Rich

muddocktor

I can tell you as a fact that Vista does take a fast computer and transforms it into an ordinary performer. And this is from a Vista Home Premium user since March. I bought my Dell laptop in March and it came with Vista and when it arrived I also bought another laptop hard drive and installed XP Pro on it and I've swapped out between the 2 quite a bit. With XP, I find that my laptop just responds better and quicker. If you go and turn off a bunch of the useless fluff of Vista such as widgets (or WFT ever they are called) and whatever else you can find to turn off it helps a bit. I still use Vista on my laptop but I think that Vista is such a performance hog it kills the performance increase you got from the hardware upgrade.

primesuspect

Vista probably has the most to do with that. You have a significantly faster computer from what you had before. I have an X2 5000+ and it runs pretty much mediocre on Vista. I'm biding my time until driver updates and service packs make it better. My Core2 duo system on XP runs way, way faster than my 5000+

Thrax

Vista is a dump.

RichD

Ok Thanks.

My next question then is relating to my hard disk. Is there a difference in performance between SATA 1 and SATA 2. I am contemplatin updating my disk soon and if SATA 2 out performs SATA 1 I will upgrade to one big SATA 2 otherwise I will get a medium SATA 2 and run in in tandum with my SATA 1.

Also can anyone recomend any Vista services I can terminate to speed things up a bit please?

Your-Amish-Daddy

Well I'll tell you like this. From my experience of running mixed mode discs in SATA, Don't do it. Build your array from like drives, if you can't do same version and brand. One large hard drive is fine, but four medium sized ones are better. OS on one, and data spread out over the others. That way if your OS gets horked or something, you can just format that drive, and be square again.

mmonnin

He doesnt have an array, just 1 drive.

You can do the same thing with only 1 drive instead of 4, its called partitions. And besides, newer, more dense drives in general perform faster than a smaller older drive. All mute points.

The hard drive is the slowest thing in ANY computer in every day use (besides an optical drive). Nowadays upgrading a CPU isnt what it used to be although Vista does make some exceptions. The hard drive will continue to be the bottleneck in performance until the general public moves away from a mechanical access and into a Random access device for permanent storage.

RichD

I ran a hard disk bench mark tool last night which seemed to test the whole hard disk by moving data around. I was quite surprised by the variance across the disk. The area towards the end was much slower than the bigining. I guess this is down to the end of the hard disk being used more and because of that extra use on that part of the disk it is running slower?

Either way I think a new hard disk is in order. I have previously played around with partions, one for OS, one for software, and one for files. Problem is if you re-install OS you still have to reinstall all the software to ad the registry key, otherwise it doesn't work. Also I like keeping all my documents in the tradional "My Documents" folder. Is it possible to move "my documents" onto another partion and get windows to recognise it as such (ie save my profile on an second partition).

Your-Amish-Daddy

Or you could just make regular backups of your registry like I do...

edcentric

Rich, I you look at HHD reviews on a site like www.anandtech.com you will see that the variation in speed that you saw is typical for all drives.
The problem that you are up against is that we gage machine speed by responsiveness, not real power. Running benchmarks will give you an indication of the power, and may make you fell a lot better, but Vista will always feel slow.

Rich, you folding right? The folding windows SMP program will like your machine.

RichD

I did do a while back but I don't think I had irt set up properly. When I get a spare 5 min I will look into it.