What to upgrade considering my profile?

Thadude

Thadude

Thadude

Associate
Joined
1 Sep 2008
Posts
9
Hi all and thank you for any advice you may offer!

Im currently running the following rig (no overclocking):

E6600 @ 2.4Ghz
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4
GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC6400C4 800MHz
HIS ATI Radeon X1950 Pro ICEQ 3 TURBO SILENT Heatpipe 256MB GDDR3
2 x Dell 24inch 2407WFP LCD monitors
3 x 7200rpm Seagate 400GB Hard disks
Tagan TG480-U01 Power Supply
Vista 32 Ultimate

I run many application concurrently (No games) e.g.
-4/5 instances of firefox 3.1 with 10-50 tabs open on each instance
-Excel and Word
-VLC media Player
-Chatting on Skype
-uTorrent
-Dozen or so apps in the task tray.

Lately Ive observed my PC slowing down and freezing for a second or two here and there. The worst is Firefox as it slowly becomes less responsive (as if there is memory leak). From my background, I would guess that I obviously need more RAM, probably 2x2GB. However, I would be interested in how anyone else would upgrade the rig above to increase the performance for my needs. Would Vista 64 with 8GB offer much more than Vista 32 with 4GB? Would a faster processor make a noticeable improvement? Money is not an issue here.

Any help is much appreciated.:)
 
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Well quad core as said above the Q6600 and a decent cooler and as money is no object the tuniq tower is fine and overclock to 3GHz+.
Also personally 4GB is a must, so something like the Geil Black Dragon 800MHz 2x2GB.
And also said vista 64bit to use all of the 4GB.
Also a new graphics card if gaming, if not its no problem.
And by the sounds a reformat :P
 
Also just to add, with uTorrent make sure you are using a completely seperate hdd. I.e. not the same hdd as where firefox is installed or any other software you are using.
 
The only things I would upgrade would be hard disks (always the slowest part of the PC), memory (its so cheap so why not) and OS (although to be frank a reinstall will clear the crud running in the background, Vista would be a good move).

In terms of free changes, use xplite/vlite to strip back the OS, and OC the CPU to 3GHz plus.
 
Ok,

So based on all your great advice, I'm going to:

1. CPU to Quad core - Q9450
2. Mem to 4GB (2X2GB Geil Black Dragon 800MHz)
3. OS hard disk to OCZ 128MB Solid State Sata II (OCZSSD2-1C128G)
4. Upgrade from Vista 32 to Vista 64 (obviously includes a full re installation)

I'm assuming therefor that my motherboard and power supply (Tagan TG480-U01) do not need to be upgraded. Also, can anyone confirm whether I can upgrade to 64 using the OEM Vista 32 Ultimate I bought from OcUK?

Looking forward to seeing how the Google Chrome architecture compares to Firefox performance when running many instances! Google Chrome on Wikipedia

Any last advice before I place my order would be appreciated as always.

Cheers!
 
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Looks like a good plan to me. Have you tried other browsers to see if there is less of a memory leak? I've never looked at any with regards this topic, but love using Opera over Firefox. With that many applications running at once, even a small improvement in software performance will have a significant impact.
 
Hi, I havn't tried Opera, i'm worried about missing my firefox extentions, but you're right, I should give it a test drive. It must be said that Firefox version 3 is a massive improvement over version 2 in terms of memory and performance (especially javascript heavy sites).

Thanks for the idea, gonna test Opera along with Chrome this w/e.
 
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