Help & FAQs    Search BCF    Members    Groups    Events Calendar
Resend my activation email : Register : Log in 
BCF: Bike Chat Forums


Upgrading my PC - is this a good purchase?

 Reply to topic
Bike Chat Forums Index -> The Geek Zone
View previous topic : View next topic  
Author Message

RideLimousin
Scooby Slapper



Joined: 13 Jan 2012
Karma :
PostPosted: 19:51 - 15 Jan 2013    Post subject: Upgrading my PC - is this a good purchase? Reply with quote
I currently have a PC with spec as follows:

2 GB DDR2 ram
Athlon 64 x2 5000+ 2.6ghz Dual core
Sata 1 HD - Diamondmax 21
Windows XP

I used it for video editing (from HD bullet cam), Photoshop, web design, web browsing etc. Its horribly slow and I need to upgrade it.

Is this a good spec for the money? https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Aufrust-PC-AMD-Bulldozer-4x-3-6GHz-Quad-Core-FX4100-8GB-DDR3-Asus-Mainboard-/400272978251?pt=DE_Technik_Computer_Peripherieger%C3%A4te_PC_Systeme&hash=item5d3220f14b

It doesnt come with DVD drive or Hard drive, so I plan to use my existing Sata 1 Diamondmax21 drive and run Windows 7 64 bit to make use of the 8GB ram.

Will the hard drive create a bottle neck or will it be fine for my uses?
I like this pc as its quad core with 8 GB ram which should be good for Adobe software.
____________________
Motorcycle Touring Holidays in France: Ridelimousin
See my ridelimousin renovation blog: https://ridelimousin.blogspot.fr
See my renovation thread: https://www.bikechatforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=244340
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

el_oso
World Chat Champion



Joined: 17 May 2008
Karma :
PostPosted: 20:16 - 15 Jan 2013    Post subject: Reply with quote
I would replace your current hard drive. something that old would be dreadfully slow. My parents PC has a two of these old hard drives set up as RAID0. In most cases this should be faster than a single disk but take this measurement with a pinch of salt. When running some tests on the disk, it's performance as a RAID0 ranked somewhere among modern 'green' disks which are meant to consume less power. These green disks are quite slow in comparison to higher performance disks, but slow as hell compared to SSD's.
If you don't mind spending a bit more and are comfortable building from scratch (it's pretty easy if you can follow simple instructions) you could probably build an intel PC with 4 proper cores (not bulldozers cores) for around about £300 by reusing the DVD drive and case etc
____________________
Duke 390
Previous: '05 XR125L | '96 XJ600S Diversion |'05 Suzuki GSXR1000 | '05 Honda CBR125-R | '97 YZF 600R Thundercat | '11 Honda CBR250
Car: Jeep Wrangler 4.0L
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

Frost
World Chat Champion



Joined: 26 May 2004
Karma :
PostPosted: 20:34 - 15 Jan 2013    Post subject: Reply with quote
Remember that ram speed is important.

When using photoshop, it has to be loaded from disc into ram, that ram is also read and written to shit loads in processing. So i'd say 4GB of quick ram is going to be much better than 8GB of normal.
As above Sata 1 is very slow by today standards and will cause all programs and files to load more slowly than you'd get with a newer PC.

That hard drive will probably struggle to get 80mb/s read speed. My Sata 3 SSD gets 500mb/s and things are still far from instant...
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail You must be logged in to rate posts

RideLimousin
Scooby Slapper



Joined: 13 Jan 2012
Karma :
PostPosted: 21:06 - 15 Jan 2013    Post subject: Reply with quote
the_godfather wrote:
I would replace your current hard drive. something that old would be dreadfully slow. My parents PC has a two of these old hard drives set up as RAID0. In most cases this should be faster than a single disk but take this measurement with a pinch of salt. When running some tests on the disk, it's performance as a RAID0 ranked somewhere among modern 'green' disks which are meant to consume less power. These green disks are quite slow in comparison to higher performance disks, but slow as hell compared to SSD's.
If you don't mind spending a bit more and are comfortable building from scratch (it's pretty easy if you can follow simple instructions) you could probably build an intel PC with 4 proper cores (not bulldozers cores) for around about £300 by reusing the DVD drive and case etc


I thought the drive might be an issue, can you recommend a drive that is cheap, compatible and significantly faster than my current drive?

I don't mind spending a bit more, but I'm not fussed about Intel over AMD etc, just want a new PC thats is a lot faster than the current one, good for HD video editing, photshop etc. I can spend a bit more if there is good reason for it. What would an intel CPU offer that the bulldozer core is missing?

I can build a PC from scratch without issue, I worked in IT before I set up Ridelimousin but I stopped reading about CPU's and the suchlike years ago! Also I kinda need my current case to replace another failed PC so can't re-use it.
____________________
Motorcycle Touring Holidays in France: Ridelimousin
See my ridelimousin renovation blog: https://ridelimousin.blogspot.fr
See my renovation thread: https://www.bikechatforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=244340
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

RideLimousin
Scooby Slapper



Joined: 13 Jan 2012
Karma :
PostPosted: 21:10 - 15 Jan 2013    Post subject: Reply with quote
Frost wrote:
Remember that ram speed is important.

When using photoshop, it has to be loaded from disc into ram, that ram is also read and written to shit loads in processing. So i'd say 4GB of quick ram is going to be much better than 8GB of normal.
As above Sata 1 is very slow by today standards and will cause all programs and files to load more slowly than you'd get with a newer PC.

That hard drive will probably struggle to get 80mb/s read speed. My Sata 3 SSD gets 500mb/s and things are still far from instant...


I was reading an article on techradar earlier which says pretty much the opposite about RAM!

Here's what they said:

Quote:
A key player in making a fast video or photo editing workstation is giving the processor exactly that, and to do so means installing as much memory as possible.


Quote:
We wouldn't worry too much about the raw speed of the memory you opt for, people can get caught up in wanting the fastest possible, but even the slower PC8500/1066MHz memory is only going to lost a couple of percentage points slower in speed over the faster PC10600/1333MHz options.


And the article link:
https://www.techradar.com/news/computing-components/how-to-buy-a-pc-for-editing-video-and-photos-718647[/quote]
____________________
Motorcycle Touring Holidays in France: Ridelimousin
See my ridelimousin renovation blog: https://ridelimousin.blogspot.fr
See my renovation thread: https://www.bikechatforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=244340
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

el_oso
World Chat Champion



Joined: 17 May 2008
Karma :
PostPosted: 00:11 - 16 Jan 2013    Post subject: Reply with quote
I would agree. (unless you have a fast SSD of course) then loading from hard drive to the RAM will take a lot longer than simply moving between the RAM. For this reason I would probably go for more RAM less speed.
Unfortunately I'm not really an expert on how adobe works, so can't really comment on how intel vs AMD will fare. The basic are, intel you get faster single thread performance compared to AMD. AMD generally give you more cores than similar priced intel. If adobe is able to use all cores. Then you may be better off with an older x6 phenom processor. The newer Bulldozer cores are not true separate cores as they share some resources. How this impacts performance I'm not quite sure.
To be completely honest, spending around £300-350 would get you a blazingly fast machine in comparison to what you have currently.
____________________
Duke 390
Previous: '05 XR125L | '96 XJ600S Diversion |'05 Suzuki GSXR1000 | '05 Honda CBR125-R | '97 YZF 600R Thundercat | '11 Honda CBR250
Car: Jeep Wrangler 4.0L
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

barrkel
World Chat Champion



Joined: 30 Jul 2012
Karma :
PostPosted: 01:50 - 16 Jan 2013    Post subject: Reply with quote
Frost wrote:
When using photoshop, it has to be loaded from disc into ram, that ram is also read and written to shit loads in processing. So i'd say 4GB of quick ram is going to be much better than 8GB of normal.


Strongly disagree. RAM speed has only ever had single-digit percentage effects on task-based benchmarks I've seen, and those are ones that stress memory in particular, like compression - most don't.

At best, fast RAM might be 33% faster than slow RAM. But most of the latency of RAM is hidden by CPU cache effects (and programs are written with awareness of this, optimizing for it), while not having enough RAM to fit the entire job means swapping to and from disk, and RAM is 100,000x faster than mechanical disk. A machine without enough RAM for its tasks is almost indistinguishable from a crashed machine.

The machine I'm typing this on has 24G of RAM, but it ought, for optimal memory speed, have matched memory on dual channels. But one of my four 8G modules had a memory error, and I left it out. So I'm not getting full memory speed, but no way would I go down to 16G to get that back. I run jobs that use most of that memory, with lower memory they'd take twice as long because I wouldn't be able to run them all in parallel.

You need enough RAM for your biggest jobs, and RAM can add up quickly in Photoshop when you have multiple raster layers on a high-resolution document. Every 8-bit channel needs width*height bytes, and standard full colour layers with transparency need 4 channels each, for RGB and Alpha transparency. A 21MP photo with 8 bits per channel will take approximately 63MB in memory in a single layer; every full-colour layer you add, if it has transparency, is 84MB. Using lots of layers adds flexibility in editing. It's technically possible to optimize memory usage for layers that only have small areas of actual non-transparent content, but I don't know how far Photoshop goes with that.

Of course, to use >4G of memory in Photoshop, you'll need to be running 64-bit Photoshop on a 64-bit version of Windows.

Video editing will benefit much more from multiple cores than from extra memory; it's heavily CPU dependent. Generally only a handful of frames are processed at a time in batch jobs, so memory requirements aren't large there, but non-linear editors may make assumptions about being run on a beefy workstation and require lots of RAM. I suspect an SSD would be a big help, possibly a bigger help than lots of RAM.
____________________
Bikes: S1000R, SH350; Exes: Vity 125, PS125, YBR125, ER6f, VFR800, Brutale 920, CB600F, SH300x4
Best road ever ridden: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2MhNxUEYtQ
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

RideLimousin
Scooby Slapper



Joined: 13 Jan 2012
Karma :
PostPosted: 12:57 - 16 Jan 2013    Post subject: Reply with quote
Hi Barrkel,

From the link I sent does that look like a good deal for what I want it for? is the Bulldozer CPU going to be an issue compared to an Intel with 4 "proper" cores?

And can you recommend a hard drive that is compatible with that motherboard (sata 2) thats not too expensive?

Thanks.
____________________
Motorcycle Touring Holidays in France: Ridelimousin
See my ridelimousin renovation blog: https://ridelimousin.blogspot.fr
See my renovation thread: https://www.bikechatforums.com/viewtopic.php?t=244340
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

barrkel
World Chat Champion



Joined: 30 Jul 2012
Karma :
PostPosted: 23:52 - 16 Jan 2013    Post subject: Reply with quote
RideLimousin wrote:
From the link I sent does that look like a good deal for what I want it for? is the Bulldozer CPU going to be an issue compared to an Intel with 4 "proper" cores?


Hmmm. When I upgrade every ~18 months, I generally buy 90..95th percentile performance components, so I'm probably not the best person to to give advice on strongly budget-constrained decisions. I willingly spend 10x to get 2x better performance. It'll take a lot of reading and comparing benchmarks that are relevant to your tasks.

The 2G -> 8G jump should make a substantial difference just about everywhere. For video encoding, you'd get a substantial improvement (almost 2x) from 4 Intel cores vs AMD cores - see Handbrake benchmarks like https://www.legitreviews.com/article/1766/7/ .

The price is OK, but similarly priced components can be put together off of ebuyer.com or scan.co.uk without too much difficulty. It's not an outstanding deal, it's competitive, especially as it's tested and preassembled, for people who worry about such things. It wouldn't put me off trying to put together my own system.

Video work is heavily CPU dependent, in your shoes I'd spend extra on a quad-core Intel CPU - encoding time should be more or less halved. But it will cost extra.

For HDD, I'd buy as decently sized 7.2K RPM (i.e. non-green) drive as you can afford. Video is bulky. Any recent HDD will be at least SATA 2.

Consider a backup subscription, if you don't already have one. I use CrashPlan. Bigger HDDs mean more lost when they fail, and they all fail eventually. I own ~15 HDDs in various machines, and see one fail about every 9 months.
____________________
Bikes: S1000R, SH350; Exes: Vity 125, PS125, YBR125, ER6f, VFR800, Brutale 920, CB600F, SH300x4
Best road ever ridden: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2MhNxUEYtQ
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

el_oso
World Chat Champion



Joined: 17 May 2008
Karma :
PostPosted: 01:52 - 17 Jan 2013    Post subject: Reply with quote
While a backup solution is advisable. I've never had a hard drive fail catastrophically. I've only ever had two fail in around 10years. One was a portable one that got bashed about a bit as it lived in a rucksack. It started clicking one day and did nothing more than copy all the files and folders of the hard drive to another. The other just plain refused to boot off. Was able to recover most if not all files by plugging in into another external caddy and recovering them that way.
As said above, a non-green 7200rpm drive will work. They are all pretty much the same, really depends on what is on offer at the retailers and what kind of warranty they come with. I'd happily pay an extra quid or two for a 5year warranty with samsung f3 or western digital over something with years.
For your particular build I'd be looking at core i5 (probbably a k model to allow for overclocking), 8Gb 1600Mhz RAM, 500Watt CPU and a samsung F3 or WD Blue. Case probably coolermaster 330/430 with around a 500W PSU.
I reckon with a half decent case and power supply will bring total nearer £400, but should last quite a while.
____________________
Duke 390
Previous: '05 XR125L | '96 XJ600S Diversion |'05 Suzuki GSXR1000 | '05 Honda CBR125-R | '97 YZF 600R Thundercat | '11 Honda CBR250
Car: Jeep Wrangler 4.0L
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts

barrkel
World Chat Champion



Joined: 30 Jul 2012
Karma :
PostPosted: 02:28 - 17 Jan 2013    Post subject: Reply with quote
the_godfather wrote:
While a backup solution is advisable. I've never had a hard drive fail catastrophically. I've only ever had two fail in around 10years.


I've had maybe 7 of 50+ drives fail in 17 odd years. I own more drives (19, not including laptops or unopened spares) now than at any other time, in part because I put a bunch in a Solaris box with zfs raidz for data redundancy. I have a stack of exact match spares for replacement, and I've used two in the past 18 months, but zero data loss because of zfs.

I used to be a computer hardware technician before I became a software engineer. People would come in with dead drives several times a week. I've seen a lot of tears shed over lack of backups; PhD students with years of work lost.

But it's the stuff I lost myself, personally, that hurts more. Once a drive starts clicking, it's 50:50 whether you get it all back. Failure mode is typically pauses on reads as the OS and drive continually retry; it can take hours to get the good bits back and not get bogged down in the bad bits. I've seen drives with high-pitched whining noises, pinging noises, those were dead losses.

Depends on how valuable the data is.
____________________
Bikes: S1000R, SH350; Exes: Vity 125, PS125, YBR125, ER6f, VFR800, Brutale 920, CB600F, SH300x4
Best road ever ridden: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2MhNxUEYtQ
 Back to top
View user's profile Send private message You must be logged in to rate posts
Old Thread Alert!

The last post was made 13 years, 259 days ago. Instead of replying here, would creating a new thread be more useful?
  Display posts from previous:   
This page may contain affiliate links, which means we may earn a small commission if a visitor clicks through and makes a purchase. By clicking on an affiliate link, you accept that third-party cookies will be set.

Post new topic   Reply to topic    Bike Chat Forums Index -> The Geek Zone All times are GMT + 1 Hour
Page 1 of 1

 
 You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You cannot download files in this forum

Read the Terms of Use! - Powered by phpBB © phpBB Group
 
Debug Mode: ON - Server: birks (www) - Page Generation Time: 0.12 Sec - Server Load: 0.71 - MySQL Queries: 14 - Page Size: 79.64 Kb