PC Upgrade advice needed. Ram and SSD

Skirrow

Skirrow

Skirrow

Associate
Joined
2 Nov 2003
Posts
108
Hi folks,

I took advice from this forum in 2014 I ordered the following as my Office PC:

Goods Shipped:
£112.49 x 1 - Intel Core i5-4440 3.10GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail
£49.99 x 1 - ASRock H87M PRO4 Intel H87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 Micro ATX Motherboard
£41.66 x 1 - TeamGroup Vulcan GOLD 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TLYD38G1600HC9DC01)
£34.99 x 1 - Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM 1TB SATA 6Gbs 64MB Cache - OEM (ST1000DM003) HDD
£26.66 x 1 - OcUK Value Imp MicroATX Tower Case (500w PSU)
£12.49 x 1 - LG GH24NSB0 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM



It's been great as my office PC but I'm putting more and more demands on it and I think it's time to upgrade. I'm not running 3 monitors off it, occasionally photo editing with Lightroom and Photoshop open at the same time, sometimes with a few images open. I normally have a ton of Chrome tabs open too.
It suffers most when photo editing but I've noticed that the HD has started clicking too so time to save it before it packs up.

I was thinking, 2 more sticks of ram to give me 16GB and a TB SSD which is enough for everything on the current one.

So, questions...

- Is that a decent upgrade path?
- If not, what should I look at? (GPX Card? CPU?)
- If so, which Ram and HD should I go for? Western Digital WDS100T2B0A 1TB SATA is only 150quid ish. Good choice? Or better get a more expensive small one and stick a normal HD in there too for storage (I have a new spare TB HD so no cost involved in that)
- Am I better starting with a new PC at this point?

Not exactly got a budget but could do with keeping it to a couple of hundred. Could push that if I was getting massive gains

Thank you!
 
I assume you mean you're now running three monitors off it.

If your HDD is clicking, get it replaced NOW. BTW is the HDD a plain Barracuda or a Barracuda Pro? Because the latter have a 5 year warranty. Since you have a spare HDD, clone it immediately.

Since this is an office PC, is this a business expense? One that you have fully depreciated? If so, just go for a full replacement.
 
Thanks!

Yes, sorry, I'm NOW running 3 monitors.

The hard drive was what prompted me to post. Been thinking of upgrading the Ram ect for a while but when I heard the clicking I realised it was a little more urgent. I'll try to clone it today to the spare and will check the warranty on the Barracuda.

It is a business expense but cash flow is tight at the moment and time is even more tight. Putting a couple of sticks of ram and an SSD (which I could take to new PC in a few months) seems preferable to starting from scratch. I tend to over research and then take ages setting everything up perfectly when reinstalling. On the other hand, if the extra ram and SSD won't make a decent improvement because of the low spec CPU then I'll just back up the hard drive now and upgrade next year.
 
no you probably wont have an M.2 Slot on board.. but dont worry about it. Installing Windows 10 on a new SSD will make that system fly, you will think you have a new PC

Make sure you are running out of RAM, open task manager and check when your doing the most tasks. the SSD will be the biggest improvement. you dont need to go Samsung there is nothing wrong with Teamgroup ones

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £74.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)​
​
 
Thanks! Was thinking of 1TB and then cloning my entire HD to it (currently got about 600GB of stuff on my HD in total). Was hoping to not have to reinstall windows if I can help it.

Just had system monitor open and it looks like Ram and drive are the problems. 3 chrome windows open, with 26 tabs in total is showing the ram at 6.8 out of 7.7GB. That's before I fire up photoshop or lightroom. Yes 26 tabs seems excessive and half of them I was able to close, but during the course of a days work they tend to build up!

Disk was maxing out when doing stuff too. (opened lightroom halfway through this graph) https://www.screencast.com/t/WqatKaf29wKo


Slightly off topic but just noticed my ram running at 1333 instead of 1600. Is it worth/possible to change this in BIOS to 1600

Thanks again!
 
you can see if theres an xmp profile in the bios for Ram. go for 16gb, i would strongly consider new install of windows. , you cant have 600gb of applications
 
Thanks again. Suppose it makes sense to reinstall windows. I was just kind of hoping for the upgrade to be a 10 min job but in retrospect it'll be better to do it properly.

Right, 16GB ram and a 500gb SSD it is. Probably massive overkill on the SSD but I don't need to worry too much about it then. Most of the 600GB is just videos/images and other crap that I can leave on HDD

Thank you both again, really appreciated!
 
Skirrow said:
Thanks again. Suppose it makes sense to reinstall windows. I was just kind of hoping for the upgrade to be a 10 min job but in retrospect it'll be better to do it properly.

Right, 16GB ram and a 500gb SSD it is. Probably massive overkill on the SSD but I don't need to worry too much about it then. Most of the 600GB is just videos/images and other crap that I can leave on HDD

Thank you both again, really appreciated!
Click to expand...

will be really fast, I had an i5 3570s, with an SSD.. still have an i7 920 floating about with SSD as well.

I would unplug the HDD until have installed windows on the SSD.. then make sure you select the correct boot drive when connecting again, not sure what i would do next but you might be able to remove the Windows Partitions from the HDD and delete the Windows folders, others may have a safer way of doing this
 
Cheers! I'll use the new HD I have knocking around to copy all the stuff I need to keep on to tonight and then I'll have a fresh, well-organised storage HD and a new install on the SSD. Making work for myself but it's satisfying work so it beat real work...
 
Kurgen said:
no you probably wont have an M.2 Slot on board.. but dont worry about it. Installing Windows 10 on a new SSD will make that system fly, you will think you have a new PC

Make sure you are running out of RAM, open task manager and check when your doing the most tasks. the SSD will be the biggest improvement. you dont need to go Samsung there is nothing wrong with Teamgroup ones

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £74.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)
​
Click to expand...

Ye for real.. i went from having my pc take 5mins to boot from old hdds...
To now taking like 5 seconds
 
If you don’t need the drives on an SSD don’t waste the money. Putting the OS on the drive will make the system feel like it’s been upgraded. A 1tb HDD is incredibly cheap, and will store the other files.

Not to be a boring Boris, but you really, really need to look at a robust backup solution if your data is at all important to you.

I’d suggest a QNAP TS-128a and a suitable WD Red. Nice and cheap, and very good.
 
Cheers, and maybe boring but very sensible. Most of my important data is stored online in various cloud services and servers with daily backups. Any bits on my PC are backed up to google drive so I think everything is covered.

That said, I have 3-4 old PCs and seem to have a handful of HDs so I might cobble something together as an extra backup and/network storage for music and movies etc, as all my media has ended up across various PCs over the years.
 
Skirrow said:
Cheers, and maybe boring but very sensible. Most of my important data is stored online in various cloud services and servers with daily backups. Any bits on my PC are backed up to google drive so I think everything is covered.

That said, I have 3-4 old PCs and seem to have a handful of HDs so I might cobble something together as an extra backup and/network storage for music and movies etc, as all my media has ended up across various PCs over the years.
Click to expand...

That’s fair enough. I use cloud services but I like using a NAS for a particular reason: randomware redundancy.

The only thing with write access to my NAS is my backup software, which keeps many, many iterations of the backup. I do a Full backup of a known good drive, and then everything after that is a differential. That way I can always roll back to a safe state; the encrypted files can’t overwrite an existing backup, and the backups themselves can’t be overwritten.

I have 6tb of data though, I’ve never really liked online backup. I appreciate I’m likely in the minority.
 
Which software do you use to manage it?

There's load of stuff I don't back up online, mainly entertainment stuff and non-work related stuff. Don't really want to lose it but won't lose too much sleep if I do. Then there's loads of old photos going back 15+ years which are spread and duplicated several times on different PCs and external hard drives. Don't want to lose those at all. I really need to get everything together, delete all the crap and organise the rest and get a proper backup solution which I can use and keep going forward.
 
Just waiting for my RAM and SSD to arrive. Been having a root around and I've found an old Radeon 5670 GFX card. Is it worth fitting this while I'm at it? THe current motherboard has onboard gfx

Cheers again!
 
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