Upgraded pc still feeling sluggish.

J-I-M

J-I-M

J-I-M

Associate
Joined
18 Jul 2010
Posts
154
Good evening overclockers.
I'm in abit of a doozy at the moment, i've recently (today) Upgraded from my old rig to a what i thought would be a pretty decent upgrade in terms of general performance and gaming. Previously i used an old Asus P5Q SE/R motherboard with an e5400 dual core slightly overclocked with 4gig corsair 800 mhz ram.

I treated myself to an upgrade: I5 core (lynnsfield 2.8 ghz, 8mb cache) Corsair XMS3 1600 and the MSI P55 GD65 motherboard however it feels just as sluggish as my previous set-up. I thought perhaps the desktop/programs were running sluggish due to abit of a clogged up HDD so i thought ok let's benchmark and run some game tests, and the scores, frame rates are roughly the same maybe a 5 to 7 increase in "some" situations but nothing i could notice. I also noticed that the cpu/ram score is only 0.1 0.2 points or so higher than previously (doesn't really bother me but even so?), what with my old set-up not only being dual core but also very out dated i'm pretty confused, i have overclocked the i5 to 3555ghz using the MSI OC button.

Any insight as to what the issue could be? or did i just completely choose the wrong set-up to go for in terms of expecting better gaming/desktop experience, System specs below:

MSI P55 GD65 mobo
I5 core quad lynnsfield @3555ghz
XMS3 corsair dual channel DDR3 1600 mhz RAM
Samsung F1 HDD 7200RPM
GTX460 @ 820/1640/2185 (with updated today drivers)
OCZ 750W PSU
 
My hdd is a Samsung F1 Spin Point it's roughly 11 months old i have 2 of them but 1 sat doing nothing at the moment, I haven't reinstalled windows i just removed previous installations of bits and bobs and installed the new. Windows task manager shows all 4 cores when sat at the desktop 0-1% usage. Phyiscal memory used 1.6 gig.
 
J-I-M said:
My hdd is a Samsung F1 Spin Point it's roughly 11 months old i have 2 of them but 1 sat doing nothing at the moment, I haven't reinstalled windows i just removed previous installations of bits and bobs and installed the new. Windows task manager shows all 4 cores when sat at the desktop 0-1% usage. Phyiscal memory used 1.6 gig.
Click to expand...

That HDD should cope fine, I would give a reinstall a go mate, use that spare hard drive to store all your Valuable data.....and porn :p
 
Kennysevenfold said:
That HDD should cope fine, I would give a reinstall a go mate, use that spare hard drive to store all your Valuable data.....and porn :p
Click to expand...

Yeah i was thinking perhaps this would be the best option, however could it drag my pc down to the point where theres no real phsyical improvement? an e5400 only has 2mb cache and 2 cores, i'll definitely give reinstalling ago when i've backed up all this crap (not porn sadly :()
 
RJC said:
There are a few new ones coming through, but majority are the same old :D

You seem to be in GD more!
Click to expand...
Ohh cool, should be in here more often now uni has finished for a while.
Just been floating about GD to take my mind of computers tbh, dealing with them in work, uni and home would drive me to top myself :p
 
The HDD being abit clogged up, could that possibly be the culprit for a whole slow system? through games, bench's afterall it's abit of a jump from a e5400 2mb cache dual core to an 8mb quad i5 and ofcourse the mobo/ram
 
J-I-M said:
Yeah i was thinking perhaps this would be the best option, however could it drag my pc down to the point where theres no real phsyical improvement? an e5400 only has 2mb cache and 2 cores, i'll definitely give reinstalling ago when i've backed up all this crap (not porn sadly :()
Click to expand...

Hi there, I would certainly add my own +1 to the windows reinstall option.

Its free, and given your spare HDD should be relatively painless to do. If you have had your HDD clogged up with stuff for a while then it can get pretty stodgy - a nice format and reinstall should give you a lovely performance boost in many situations.

As for can it drag the performance down to the level of your core 2? It certainly can in some instances. There are many things on your system that are not limited not by the speed of your CPU, RAM or graphics card - but your hard disk. In these situations (like booting and program loading) you could have the fastest CPU in the world and it will run just as "slowly" as your E5400, since it is waiting for the hard disks to move all the files into working memory.
 
cmndr_andi said:
As for can it drag the performance down to the level of your core 2? It certainly can in some instances. There are many things on your system that are not limited not by the speed of your CPU, RAM or graphics card - but your hard disk. In these situations (like booting and program loading) you could have the fastest CPU in the world and it will run just as "slowly" as your E5400, since it is waiting for the hard disks to move all the files into working memory.
Click to expand...

+1, but surely the limit of the HDD would'nt hold back the CPU/mobo and ram from gaining better scores on the benchmarks the OP has ran?

And Hiiii.! I remember you.! :p
 
Kennysevenfold said:
+1, but surely the limit of the HDD would'nt hold back the CPU/mobo and ram from gaining better scores on the benchmarks the OP has ran?

And Hiiii.! I remember you.! :p
Click to expand...

Hi Kenny, Nice to see you round these parts again :)

You are quite right about the benchmarks, you wouldn't expect the HDD to limit these things, but the system might "feel" slow/sluggish in general desktop use as it mainly involve loading things from storage.

The problem in the OPs case might be down to the choice of benchmarks and games. With the same GPU (GTX 460) and a new CPU (i5, upgraded from E5400) if it is a GPU heavy benchamark or an in-game benchmark - the majority of these will not register much of a performance difference since its the GTX 460 that is being tested and the E5400 (with OC) was fast enough to cope. I'm sure if he runs a CPU heavy game (like BF:BC2 or GTA4) then he should see a big performance increase with the new setup.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for buckling that down for me i see how this effects the overall performance now and feel more that the HDD is definitely the culprit what with having no end of useless crap on there i never got around to getting rid of. Just an example of what exactly i'm benching is:

Mafia 2
BF:BC2( yet to try )
Just Cause 2
Furmark (benching not stability)
3dmark06
and lastly
World of Warcraft (i've read this game is pretty CPU intensive, even to this day given the age of the game) the frames on this one tend to hover around 60 in dx9 and dx11 and given quite abit of load the frames can drastically drop down anywhere to 20-29 and stick there untill i move out of the load.

i do however understand that some of these are just graphic based so perhaps the card isn't offering me what i need in terms of games like mafia 2, with AA on it hovers around 28 on the benchmark.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom