Another Upgrade Question
phuschnickens
Beverly Hills, Michigan Member
We recently upgraded to the CS4 Suite at work (just Indesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat), also have a font manager running all the time and outlook and itunes and quickbooks and firefox. We do not work with large size graphics or do anything exceptionally system intensive. This is on 32bit XP sp3. Since the new install the computer has gotten noticeably slower (although it wasn't absolutely perfect before).
The current specs are:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Windsor 2.4GHz Socket AM2 89W Dual-Core
BIOSTAR TFORCE4 AM2 AM2 NVIDIA nForce4
OCZ Gold 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
GECUBE RX1600PRO-256M PCIE Radeon X1600PRO 256MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16
OCZ PowerStream OCZ520ADJSLI 520W ATX12V 2.01, BTX, EPS12V SLI Certified
and a WD 80GB 10k RPM (don't remember exact model)
Now, if an upgrade would be worth it (and I'd have to convince my boss b/c it's not my money)... then i'm thinking a new mobo, cpu, and mem might be in order.
Will this show a big improvement?:
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core
GIGABYTE GA-G31M-ES2L LGA 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Thanks for the opinions
The current specs are:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ Windsor 2.4GHz Socket AM2 89W Dual-Core
BIOSTAR TFORCE4 AM2 AM2 NVIDIA nForce4
OCZ Gold 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
GECUBE RX1600PRO-256M PCIE Radeon X1600PRO 256MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCI Express x16
OCZ PowerStream OCZ520ADJSLI 520W ATX12V 2.01, BTX, EPS12V SLI Certified
and a WD 80GB 10k RPM (don't remember exact model)
Now, if an upgrade would be worth it (and I'd have to convince my boss b/c it's not my money)... then i'm thinking a new mobo, cpu, and mem might be in order.
Will this show a big improvement?:
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core
GIGABYTE GA-G31M-ES2L LGA 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
Thanks for the opinions
0
Comments
4GB memory on a 32bit will show improvement past 3GB? I've searched for clear info on this and I find a lot of conflicting reports.
Memory capacity aside, however, i'm a bit of a noob with this stuff, but I see that that L2 Cache is much greater (i think from 2 x 512mb to 6mb) but the mobo FSB and the mem FSB are the same... where is the real improvement?
As far as the CPU is concerned, this article will explain why the Core 2 Duo (and Quad) CPUs are amazingly fast. The chip you have there is the 45nm Wolfdale, which is a revised and smaller Core 2 Duo that's 10-20% faster than the one I wrote about in the article I just linked.
It's all about how the chip is designed, and the Core 2 is designed to be profoundly faster than the Athlon 64, even at the same speeds.