Upgrade doesn't seem to make much difference

Darkst4r

Darkst4r

Darkst4r

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I recently built my first PC to upgrade from a decrepit Pentium 4 3.06ghz with 1GB of Ram to an AMD Phenom II 955 with 4gb of Ram running at 1800mhz on an asus m4a785td-v evo.

I was expecting to be blown away by the performance comparisson but to be honest I'm having a hard time finding much difference. Sure I can play the latest games now but in general, operating system tasks like booting up, shutting down and loading my start up programs I fail to see a difference atall.

What kind of things should I be looking for that will be noticeably faster from my old P4 system ?

Am I making the most of my processor or should I be unlocking things in the bios to improve performance ?

Is there any kind of program or task I could run to see the performance increase ?
 
In games, generally the GPU is what will cause the biggest increase in performance.
For tasks like booting and loading programs etc, the hard drive is the bottleneck. Only way to really overcome that is to get an SSD or get a hold of some fast mechanical drives and stick them in RAID0.
 
Ahh I see, I thought it might be that holding things up. I guess some processes rely on how fast data can be transferred to and from the HDD.
 
No I'm using an old Samsung SATA drive. I fomatted it first, and not just the quick format. It's about 5 years old though so could probably do with replacing.
 
Yep my WD black totally flies compared to my old 80GB IDEs! Might have to look into SSDs one day :).

To be honest your old P4 isn't that horrible, so depending on what version of windows you have, windows tasks/apps wouldn't have been pushing it too hard anyway. The stuff you mentioned - bootup, shutdown, opening programs is all HDD bottlenecked so you'll not see a massive gain until you get a decent HDD or SDD. Games and CPU intensive tasks like encoding are where you'll see massive gains, especially if they use the multiple cores.
 
Darkst4r said:
I'm using Windows 7 64 bit
Click to expand...

Good stuff, were you using this OS with the P4 system as well?

As for which things will be faster, as has already been mentioned - much of the general windows tasks are limited by the storage drive. So an SSD provides noticable gains within windows and provides a much "snappier" feel.

Things that a quad core CPU and 4GB of RAM will help you with are usually related to applications. You will be able to UnRAR your files much faster (to the point that it is your HDD not your CPU that is the limiting factor) and tasks like encoding video and crunching numbers in Excel will happen at a significantly greater pace. Also, with so much RAM available to Superfetch - windows should be able to load some heavily used programs much faster, even without the aid of an SSD.
 
Thanks for the info. I was a die hard XP user up until recently ( I tried Vista but couldn't get on with it) and only ever used 32 bit OS.

I might have a look into running an SSD soon but cant really justify the price for now.
 
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