HDD or RAM upgrade?

Greenboi

Greenboi

Greenboi

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Hey all.

I cant decide which to upgrade to get the best performance boost. At the moment i get a lot of stuttering in games, and fairly long load times in everything. I have 2gb ram, and an IDE 250gb hard drive.

Which would be better to upgrade? to 4gb of ram or to a SATA2 hard drive? The main aim is to reduce stutter in games really, and to improve general performance of the OS.

OS is Vista Home Premium 32 Bit.

Thanks in advance.
 
Ok how long sisnce you installed vista and what sort of antivurs/malware scanner do you use lastley what games are you getting the stuttering in.

I ask because i have a

[email protected]
2gb DDR2 generic 800mhz
gigabyte 8800gt
GA-G33M-S2 matx mobo
3x 160gb sata 2 hard drives and a 80gb IDE drive with vista 32bit on it

i started to get jerkyness in game at certain points things just didnt feel rite and i new they should have. after a reformat everything felt much better and your machine should really be playing games smoothly enough unless your trying to play at silly resolutions with that card?
 
Installed vista less than a week ago, getting stutter in all games, Crysis, TF2, HL2 eps, Gears of War, pretty much all of them. Only play at 1280x1024, no AA/AF. Dont have any malware/antivirus installed just yet either.
 
Greenboi said:
Installed vista less than a week ago, getting stutter in all games, Crysis, TF2, HL2 eps, Gears of War, pretty much all of them. Only play at 1280x1024, no AA/AF. Dont have any malware/antivirus installed just yet either.
Click to expand...

you using latest drivers?
 
In my experience, the switch from an IDE hard drive to a SATA one resulted in an absolutely huge performance increase. I don't play PC games so I can't comment there, but Windows in general was a lot quicker. Simple things like extracting big RAR archives sped up almost 300%.

I've only ever had 1GB of RAM, so I can't comment about that.
 
I'd personally probably upgrade that old IDE drive, to a new SATA2 harddrive. Upgrading from 2GB ram to 4GB (3.25GB 32-Bit ) is virtually unnoticible. Sata2 significantly decreases loading times and loading textures in games.

2GB is plenty for almost anything, even on vista. If you are experiencing a lot of jerky-ness in games, I'd look at your graphics card, perhaps upgrading that. I've had 2 x 320MB 8800GTS cards, and experienced a lot of jerky-ness with them and blamed them on the lack of Vram(320MB). For new games, high quality textures and lots of AA, 320MB just doesn't cut it.

But anyway, to sum it up - With a system with your specs, you should not be running an IDE hard-drive. You are throwing power out the window & loading times in games and the operating system.

Hj
 
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Okay thanks guys, looks like ill be getting me a new sata2 hard drive, and perhaps a new graphics card in feb some time.

Can you guys reccomend any hard drives that are fast and ideally less than 80 quid?
 
Greenboi said:
Okay thanks guys, looks like ill be getting me a new sata2 hard drive, and perhaps a new graphics card in feb some time.

Can you guys reccomend any hard drives that are fast and ideally less than 80 quid?
Click to expand...

depending on storage, but any of the latest Samsung, hitatchi, WD, or Seagate, SATA 16MB cache 7,200rpm drives will be a lot faster than your current IDE drive.
 
I've used several hitachi SATA2 drives (currently using 2 x 500GB's) and never had one issue at all with any Hitachi drives. Dead silent too, no loading noises and quite fast.

Although, I have heard good things about samsung spinpoints around these forums, so maybe have a look at them. Once its sata2, I guess get as much as you can afford :)

Hj
 
I'd upgrade the hard drive.

Not because SATA2 is particularly better than IDE, per-se, but that all the newest, and fastest, drives are SATA2.

Your system shouldn't really be struggling in anything other than Crysis, especially at only 1280x1024 with no AA/AF.
 
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