PC Upgrade recommendations

[John Brown]

As its about 5 years since last upgrade and now out of touch with what's
what I'm seeking any recommendations.

Not a big gamer but would like an up-to-date reasonably high end system for
e-mail, internet, general office processes together with photo and some
video work and not too worried about the costs.

My current system is AMD Athlon 2500 Barton. Existing Screen and Power
Supply etc will be ok.

Thought I'd invest in something like:-

CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E8500

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3L

Graphics card - Have a Sapphire 9600xt 128mb - Wondering if to invest in AMD
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512mb

Memory - 2 (or perhaps 4) GB 800Mhz Corsair

Hard Drive - Wetern Digital Caviar 640GB 7200 RPM

Operating system - Have XP - Wondering if to invest in Vista Home 64

Any observations/recommendations on the above gratefully received.

Thanks, John

 

[John Weiss]

Not a big gamer but would like an up-to-date reasonably high end system for
e-mail, internet, general office processes together with photo and some video
work and not too worried about the costs.

Thought I'd invest in something like:-

CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E8500
Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3L

Look at all the DS3 and DS4 specs to make sure you get the features (mainly,
numbers of various ports) you need.

Graphics card - Have a Sapphire 9600xt 128mb - Wondering if to invest in AMD
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512mb

The HIS cards with Ice Q3 or 4 cooling are nice and quiet.

Memory - 2 (or perhaps 4) GB 800Mhz Corsair

4 GB doesn't cost much more, and "more is better" (up to 4 GB for 32-bit) for XP
or Vista.

Hard Drive - Wetern Digital Caviar 640GB 7200 RPM

With a "high end" system I'd invest in a VelociRaptor for the main HD, and a 500
or 750 GB vertical media HD for excess data and backup.

Operating system - Have XP - Wondering if to invest in Vista Home 64

I think XP Pro is the sweet spot right now.

 

[Paul]

As its about 5 years since last upgrade and now out of touch with what's
what I'm seeking any recommendations.

Not a big gamer but would like an up-to-date reasonably high end system for
e-mail, internet, general office processes together with photo and some
video work and not too worried about the costs.

My current system is AMD Athlon 2500 Barton. Existing Screen and Power
Supply etc will be ok.

Thought I'd invest in something like:-

CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E8500

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3L

Graphics card - Have a Sapphire 9600xt 128mb - Wondering if to invest in AMD
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512mb

Memory - 2 (or perhaps 4) GB 800Mhz Corsair

Hard Drive - Wetern Digital Caviar 640GB 7200 RPM

Operating system - Have XP - Wondering if to invest in Vista Home 64

Any observations/recommendations on the above gratefully received.

Thanks, John

Sounds like a nice system.

The HD 4850 is mid way up the gaming charts, so could be
considered a gaming card. There are possibly lower performance cards
that could support photo and video work. If you wanted a couple
DVI connectors on the faceplate, some of those cards are a tiny bit
more expensive than the bottom of the barrel ones with VGA and
DVI on the faceplate. Since even a $35 card has a PCI Express
x16 interface operating at 4GB/sec, there is no bottleneck to
copying video data to the frame buffer.

As far as the OS is concerned, I suppose it would depend on what
you thought the merits of Vista were. The x64 bit aspect of your
choice, would mean support for more memory. But the application
itself probably has some limitation (assuming you're reusing
some of your existing 32 bit applications). I've heard of people using
high end applications, and being surprised when their application
refused to use more than 2GB. You can always run multiple applications
with large memory footprints, and gain some advantage of a large
physical memory. And Vista has some acceleration functions (like
caching or prefetching), that make use of any spare memory. So
at least with Vista, an abundance of memory would not be wasted.

Some of the memory limitations for Windows OSes, are listed
here.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx

Paul

 

[John Doe]

As its about 5 years since last upgrade and now out of touch with
what's what I'm seeking any recommendations.

Not a big gamer but would like an up-to-date reasonably high end
system for e-mail, internet, general office processes together
with photo and some video work and not too worried about the
costs.

My current system is AMD Athlon 2500 Barton.

You will get a big performance increase from a multiple core CPU.

Existing Screen and Power Supply etc will be ok.

What power supply?

CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E8500

Recent applications probably take better advantage of additional
cores. I started with the E6850.

Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3L

Biggest concern is how it handles greater core CPUs, IMO. It's a
great upgrade path.

Memory - 2 (or perhaps 4) GB 800Mhz Corsair

Probably two sticks of 2 GB each. Probably minimum 2 GB modules.

Hard Drive - Wetern Digital Caviar 640GB 7200 RPM

I think 10,000 RPM SATA is the way to go, unless you download lots
of multimedia.

Operating system - Have XP - Wondering if to invest in Vista Home
64

Who uses more than 3.5 GB of RAM?
What application requires 64-bit Windows?

Since you already have XP and you're not planning on
a prebuilt system with Windows bundled, obviously not.
Bundled Windows might be a hassle anyway.

I am upgrading to 4 GB, and then later add a quad core CPU.

Why Office Depot puts 64-bit Windows on its ordinary desktop
computers is a mystery to me, some even have a hardware maximum
memory limit of 4 GB.

 

[John Doe]

I think XP Pro is the sweet spot right now.

Compared to XP Home:
Any difference in stability?
Is there a functional benefit for typical use?

 

[John Weiss]

Compared to XP Home:
Any difference in stability?

Nothing specific that I know of.

Is there a functional benefit for typical use?

Will run with dual CPUs (may be an advantage with Nehalem).

"Normal" NT file sharing instead of the bastardized "simple file sharing" that
XPHome uses. That means better security on a LAN or a laptop.

 

[Dave]

As its about 5 years since last upgrade and now out of touch with what's
what I'm seeking any recommendations.

Not a big gamer but would like an up-to-date reasonably high end system for
e-mail, internet, general office processes together with photo and some
video work and not too worried about the costs.

My current system is AMD Athlon 2500 Barton. Existing Screen and Power
Supply etc will be ok.

Not unless you've upgraded your power supply SIGNIFICANTLY within the last
year. A typical Barton sized power supply won't even boot a Core 2 Duo with
a Radeon 4850.

Thought I'd invest in something like:-

CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E8500
OK


Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3L

Looking good.

Graphics card - Have a Sapphire 9600xt 128mb - Wondering if to invest in AMD
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512mb

Not a bad choice

Memory - 2 (or perhaps 4) GB 800Mhz Corsair
excellent



Hard Drive - Wetern Digital Caviar 640GB 7200 RPM

You have good taste

Operating system - Have XP - Wondering if to invest in Vista Home 64

I'll get flamed for this, but I would wholeheartedly recommend it! Just
make sure that it's home premium, and I don't personally think that vista
ultimate is worth the extra cost. But Vista is great. Don't listen to all
the idiots who like to bash it, most of whom haven't even tried it. Vista
is an upgrade from XP. I run several operating systems including Vista and
various linux distros and XP (on my older laptop). I believe Vista is the
best OS that microsoft has released so far.

Any observations/recommendations on the above gratefully received.

Thanks, John

Just add an Earthwatts 650W or something like that, and you should be all
set. -Dave

 

[John Doe]

So at least with Vista, an abundance of memory would not be
wasted.

That depends on the user, doesn't it?

How much RAM are you currently using, Paul? What is your maximum RAM
usage? What is your most RAM hungry application? How much RAM does
it use?

 

[John Doe]

I'll get flamed for this, but I would wholeheartedly recommend it!

The only reason you should get flamed is because it's a silly
question. John already has Windows XP. Unless he is afraid of
installing Windows, there is no point in buying Vista unless and
until his applications need it. An operating system upgrade should
be based on need.

Putting the 32-bit versus 64-bit question aside.

But Vista is great. Don't listen to all the idiots who like to
bash it, most of whom haven't even tried it. Vista is an upgrade
from XP. I run several operating systems including Vista and
various linux distros and XP (on my older laptop). I believe
Vista is the best OS that microsoft has released so far.

It could be. Obviously you think so. What I don't see in your
repetitive praise for Vista is the reason it's a better operating
system. The question isn't "is anything wrong with Vista" the
question is "how will Vista improve my personal computing
experience".

Applications are what matter to a user.

Do applications run better on Vista than they do on XP?

Are applications more stable on Vista than they are on XP?

Besides paying my personal computer user dues to Microsoft, why
should I upgrade to Vista?

 

[Paul]

That depends on the user, doesn't it?

How much RAM are you currently using, Paul? What is your maximum RAM
usage? What is your most RAM hungry application? How much RAM does
it use?

I just pointed out, that Vista uses memory for things like
prefetch functions. The space is surrendered on demand. The
first OS I encountered, which could make multiple uses
from memory like that, was the SunOS.

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=3

I have 2GB on WinXP, and currently that is plenty. Like my
previous system, my daily peak is roughly 800MB or so. WinXP
doesn't contain as many memory reuse functions as Vista does.
So an excess of memory, may not be that useful in the WinXP
case.

WinXP does have file caching. I just ran a test to verify
it was present. I ran a checksum program on a large file.
On the first invocation, the run time was 16 seconds. On
the second run, the time was 4 seconds. The entire file
fits in RAM, so the disk drive light doesn't even need
to blink. MacOSX also has this function, and I remember
being blown away once, when I ran into this by accident.
(Ran the same command twice, and the second invocation
only took a second to execute.)

One thing I still cannot figure out, is why the search
function in WinXP doesn't seem to use file caching. The
second invocation is practically as slow as the first.
Under Win2K, the second invocation got accelerated by
the directory structure being cached in RAM. While I
understand there is an "indexing service" in WinXP, to
create an index to help the search function, I'm really
surprised that non-index based operation isn't making better
use of the caching functions that already exist.

On Win2K, when files are touched, the search function
knows it, and goes to disk for the areas that have
been recently touched. My antivirus software used to
do stuff in the background, and a side effect, was
extending the run time of search commands for
files and folders.

Paul

 

[Dave]

..

It could be. Obviously you think so. What I don't see in your
repetitive praise for Vista is the reason it's a better operating
system. The question isn't "is anything wrong with Vista" the
question is "how will Vista improve my personal computing
experience".

Ok, just a few off the top of my head...
First, Vista boots much faster ON THE SAME HARDWARE than XP does. By "boots
faster" I mean that you can start working much faster counting from the time
you hit the power button to the time you have full control over whatever
applications you want to run. Vista is much faster getting to that point of
being USEFUL.
Second, it's more stable than XP. XP is pretty stable, so any improvement
in stability is impressive.
Third, it recovers from unexpected blips much more gracefully than XP. Like
if your baby hits the reset button or you have an unexpected power brownout
or similar, Vista will just restart without error messages or corrupted
files, or requiring input from YOU as to what you want it to do. That is
(IMHO) a huge improvement over XP.
Fourth, Vista is more intuitive than XP. That one is according to my wife.
I don't really see a difference. But SHE thinks Vista is more user
friendly, and that's something coming from someoone who knows nothing about
computers. She actually uses the computer a lot more since I put Vista on
it...and has been able to figure out how to do stuff a lot more without
asking me for help. I think this last reason is probably the best reason to
recommend Vista over XP for average users. More user friendly is awesome
stuff.

Don't get me wrong, XP is great!!! But IMHO, Vista is definitely an upgrade
from XP, for the reasons I listed above. And that is just a short
ist. -Dave

Applications are what matter to a user.

Do applications run better on Vista than they do on XP?

It depends on who you ask. The only difference I see is that they start a
lot faster. But my wife would answer this question YES!!!! From the point
of view of someone who knows almost nothing about computers. Vista is the
OS for people who don't want to learn computers.

Are applications more stable on Vista than they are on XP?

OMG YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Besides paying my personal computer user dues to Microsoft, why
should I upgrade to Vista?

YOU personally, should NOT upgrade to Vista. You are so determined to hate
it that even after you install it and discover that you love it, you will
still post here that you hate it. So please, forget that Vista exists.
Stick to XP. -Dave

 

[John Weiss]

First, Vista boots much faster ON THE SAME HARDWARE than XP does. By "boots
faster" I mean that you can start working much faster counting from the time
you hit the power button to the time you have full control over whatever
applications you want to run. Vista is much faster getting to that point of
being USEFUL.

For a large number of people who seldom rebott their computers, that gives
little if any advantage.

Second, it's more stable than XP. XP is pretty stable, so any improvement
in stability is impressive.

Dunno 'bout that... With the problems I've seen with UAC on shared semi-public
computers, I can't yet agree.

Third, it recovers from unexpected blips much more gracefully than XP. Like
if your baby hits the reset button or you have an unexpected power brownout
or similar, Vista will just restart without error messages or corrupted
files, or requiring input from YOU as to what you want it to do. That is
(IMHO) a huge improvement over XP.

Again, I'm not sure that is an advantage. I'd rather have the possibility of
some control over the boot process, and I'll willingly give the OS 5 or 10
seconds to sit and wait for me to decide to intervene if I want. Note that the
context of this discussion is a forum of PC homebuilders, so they are likely to
be reasonably technically savvy...

Fourth, Vista is more intuitive than XP. That one is according to my wife.
I don't really see a difference. But SHE thinks Vista is more user
friendly, and that's something coming from someoone who knows nothing about
computers.

It's different. For those used to the NT/2K/XP evolution, it's ridiculously
convoluted to find many of the "standard" functions. For those who start using
computers in earnest from scratch on Vista, it may be "intuitive"...

OMG YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That is, assuming those apps run on Vista to begin with...

I don't want to have to replace my apps and utilities every time I upgrade the
OS. Many of us were forced to do so with XP, and for many of those, having to
do it again for Vista is not worth the cost...

 

[John Doe]

For a large number of people who seldom rebott their computers,
that gives little if any advantage.
Yup.

Dunno 'bout that... With the problems I've seen with UAC on
shared semi-public computers, I can't yet agree.

Application stability was the huge advantage going from Windows 98
to Windows XP, including the real memory management.

It's different. For those used to the NT/2K/XP evolution, it's
ridiculously convoluted to find many of the "standard" functions.

Reminds me of Windows XP hiding the file manager Windows Explorer in
the path (Start -- All Programs -- Accessories). But you probably can
shave off the fuzzy stuff.

Something I missed about Windows 98 SE/Millennium was gradient title
bars. Windows XP allows reverting to that. My active title bar
blends from deep orange to yellow, and the inactive title bars go
from dark blue to sky blue. So the active window looks hot and the
inactive windows look cold. Me like it that way.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/27532210@N04/3070110734/

Something very attractive (to me) about Vista is its built-in speech
recognition, maybe combined with scripting. Apparently it doesn't yet
compare to Naturally Speaking, but how soon it skillfully does speech
driven scripting just depends on when Microsoft wants it to happen.
Windows hasn't included automation since Windows 3.1 Macro Recorder.

 

[John Brown]

What power supply?

Existing is Antec Trueblue 480w...do you reckon that wil be ok - or is it a
bit light?

 

[John Brown]

Not unless you've upgraded your power supply SIGNIFICANTLY within the last
year. A typical Barton sized power supply won't even boot a Core 2 Duo
with
a Radeon 4850.



Looking good.


Not a bad choice


You have good taste


I'll get flamed for this, but I would wholeheartedly recommend it! Just
make sure that it's home premium, and I don't personally think that vista
ultimate is worth the extra cost. But Vista is great. Don't listen to
all
the idiots who like to bash it, most of whom haven't even tried it. Vista
is an upgrade from XP. I run several operating systems including Vista
and
various linux distros and XP (on my older laptop). I believe Vista is the
best OS that microsoft has released so far.


Just add an Earthwatts 650W or something like that, and you should be all
set. -Dave

 

[Dave]

Just add an Earthwatts 650W or something like that, and you should be
all
Well your hardware is probably close to 275W total. That's not much, but
that's over 50% of the total rated maximum capacity of your current power
supply. As I wrote in another thread... it will probably work, but don't
expect the power supply to last very long under that type of load. It's a
bit under-sized. You should aim for no more than 40% of your power supply's
maximum capacity. That would be about 650-700W. Or, an Antec Earthwatts
650W would be a PERFECT fit, as this one is very efficient. Note that the
Earthwatts series is made by Seasonic (earlier) and Delta (later) but expert
reviews generally agree that both versions are good.

Don't get me wrong. Your true blue 480 will probably run that system. But
it will be working VERY hard to do so. I can't tell you not to use the
trueblue 480. But I can tell you that I, personally, would not run your
hardware on a trueblue 480. -Dave

 

[John Doe]

As mentioned above have a Antec trueblue 480w at the mo - ok or a
bit short?

As long as the connectors fit, that's probably more than enough.
I use a TP2-380 for my system including a 7950GT/512MB.

Good luck and have fun.

 

[John Doe]

You should aim for no more than 40% of your power supply's maximum
capacity.

Anything is possible, Dave, but like we tell the newbies, power
supply maximum capacity alone means little since manufacturers have
no standard for power supply wattage output rating.

That would be about 650-700W.

Only if you are looking at a cheap power supply with a highly
exaggerated wattage rating.

 

[John Weiss]

Existing is Antec Trueblue 480w...do you reckon that wil be ok - or is it a
bit light?

Should be OK as long as it has the proper ATX 12V connector and a good enough
12V rail to support the PCIe gfx card.

 

[John Weiss]

Well your hardware is probably close to 275W total. That's not much, but
that's over 50% of the total rated maximum capacity of your current power
supply. As I wrote in another thread... it will probably work, but don't
expect the power supply to last very long under that type of load. It's a
bit under-sized. You should aim for no more than 40% of your power supply's
maximum capacity.

I've read several tech reviews in the past that give the "sweet spot" for PSUs
as the 20-60% of max rating range.

However, the 12V rail is the most heavily loaded one, so the system could well
get to well over 60% of the 12V capacity. In that case, a bigger PSU would be
in order.

FWIW, my P35-DS4 MoBo with E6850 CPU, X1950 gfx, and 3 HDs runs around 175 watts
at full CPU load (according to my APC UPS with LED display). Add about 50 watts
for the 4870 at full load; subtract about 10 watts per HD not installed. My
X48-DS4 with Q9450 CPU, 3850 gfx, and 2 HDs runs around 250 watts at full CPU
and GPU load. Folding@Home provides the continuous loads. PSU on both is Antec
Earthwatts 500, which should be plenty for your system, but you could go to the
650 if you are considering a bigger gfx card AND will be using it at full load a
lot of the time...