PC Upgrade, worth it?

Hi All

I built a PC for a friend a couple of years ago, spec:

i7 920
HD 4890
6GB RAM
1 x Velociraptor
2 x 500gb Samsung drives RAID 0
2 x 1.5TB Samsung drives RAID 1

He uses his PC for his .net development work, HD Video editing and playing games.

He's asked me if theres any upgrades he can make to make video editing and gaming faster, but is reluctant to overclock his CPU at all.

So other than oc'ing his CPU (which I'm still gonna try and talk him into), what could be upgraded to improve this PC? Without having to change from the 1366 socket.

I thought maybe a Gulftown CPU might make a decent upgrade but not sure the GPU needs to be changed? Maybe 12GB RAM?

Any ideas?

SSD is probably the easiest thing to make a big differance.

6GB would be plenty for me... but I don't video edit etc so someone else may be able to advise on that!

Gaming can be made faster by upgrading the GPU (the CPU is fast enough not to limit games). Video editing can be made faster by upgrading the CPU - the 950 would give a slight increase, but better to get a 970 with the extra cores.

I've only done a little bit of video editing, but I'm not RAM limited with 6GB. SSD wouldn't make much difference as video stuff still tends to be CPU limited.

I was thinking of reccommending the i7 980, from what I can tell the newer CPU's like Sandybridge etc aren't really any more faster than the older i7's?

Is the 980 worth £480 for the bump in performance?

I thought 6GB would be ok, never limited me on my PC either, but never really done much in the way of video editing.

Are there really any games about that push the 4890 to its max? I know Crysis 2 is on his "to play" list.

Worth depends on a number of factors. If he saves times editing videos and his salary is £x per hour then you can work out how much it would be worth depending on how much his salary is and how many videos he edits etc.

An OC would probably bring about a better result/cost value, but if that's off the cards then the only option is to drop in a bigger CPU or change the whole system - if he's limited to the point of needing an upgrade.

The game question will also depend on what resolution he's gaming at. A 4890 is still a very powerful card, but it's also lacking DX11 which some games can take advantage of.

Well he's got a 1920 x 1200 24 inch monitor, so nothing too big. I'm thinking the 4890 will do him as games are just a side thing, not something he'll be doing all the time.

Oh the Video editing is also a personal thing, not work! He keeps his personal PC at work and just comes into the office to play games etc!

Just wondering, having never used Adobe premier, does it have any settings to pass some of the encoding off on to the GPU? Or is it purely CPU?

I'm fairly sure CS4 is only CPU, not sure about CS5.
What about a second hand 970 ?

I'd agree with the SSD option.

SSD over what though? He already has a Velociraptor boot drive. Not so sure an ssd would help video editing much??

Using an SSD as a boot drive instead would be a vast improvement over the Velociraptor, especially in terms of the time it takes to boot up, or open big programs like photoshop/video editing software.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by adz08

Hi All
920
HD 4890
6GB RAM
1 x Velociraptor
2 x 500gb Samsung drives RAID 0
2 x 1.5TB Samsung drives RAID 1

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If he is video editing with it then I would reccommend getting extra ram, especially for rendering, what power supply does the system have because I would recommend getting a new Graphics card mabey the 6970?
Another good upgrade that I can recommend is a SSD to put some of the large slow starting programs on or to boot the system from.

....

For gaming, *definitely* upgrade the 4890. Powerful in its day, but that was - what, 2 and a half years ago? The 5870 was a massive improvement over the 4890: the Hexus review pitted a 5870 against a 4870 X2 and a 4890 OC with the 5870 getting very close to the X2! So there's plenty of options available as a significant step up from a 4890: the GTX560 Ti and Radeon 6950 are the obvious options at or below £200.

Otherwise, an OC on the 920, or as you say a step up to Gulftown (or even a step up to gulftown and *then* overclock :devilish:), are the obvious options. I don't think an SSD is going to make a huge difference to the uses that he feels are slow. An extra 6GB of physical RAM certainly won't affect his gaming, but I guess it *might* make a difference to the video work. That's easy enough to test in Windows 7 though: just open task manager and monitor the physical memory usage whilst performing that task!

If he is serious about video editing then you should go with a dual socket Xeon motherboard based on intel 5500 design (5520 if budget is no issue)

Then you can throw in two quad CPUs or if money is no object 2 8 core CPU's

If video editing is more important to him the he should get a Nvidia Quadro graphics adapter or he can just upgrade the graphics card as scaryjim said a GTX560 is a good upgrade or if you want something more a GTX 580.

I would do some investigation work first.

Get him to show you what games are slow....decide if it is a GPU or CPU problem first. An un-overclocked 920 could seem a tad slow in some games. Give it an overclock (if only temporarily) to confirm.

Then fire up resource monitor and get him to show you what video editing stuff is slow. You will be able to tell from the disk queue length and CPU utilisation whether it's the disk or CPU that is bottle-necking him.

From there, you will be much better informed before spending his money ;)

ssd would make a difforence ecspecialy to gameing and video editing

Upgrade EVERYTHING.

Boot drive: Velociraptor out, SSD in, I'd take a crucial m4, 64/128/256GB depending on how much stuff cannot be moved to another drive.

CPU wise overclocking would be cheapest, so long as there is a decent cooling solution in place (replace that if not, Corsair H50/60/70 maybe), failing that a 960 or 970. The 980(X) isn't worth the disproportionate extra money for one multiplier bump.

The good advice above to do some of his work and see whether the CPU, RAM or disks are maxed out.

If RAM then double up to 12GB. Could dump the lot and buy some lower latency and higher speed memory, 1600MHz CL8 or 1866MHz CL9 isn't that expensive anymore.

If CPU then see above (upgrading CPU never really hurts though, *something* will be quicker!)

If disks then I assume that the RAID0 is the scratch drive where the 'workspace' is? Well replace that with SSDs as well, could be pricey though to get the same capacity, could look into a PCI-E SSD. If that's too pricey you could look into 15K SAS drives (they are NOT quiet though) and a basic SAS controller. Even cheaper if you replace the Raptor boot drive, then get another and RAID0 that up.

Thanks for the replies guys.

I've talked him into definently overclocking his CPU for now, and another 6GB RAM.

He's has a budget of £400 for upgrades or did say he wouldn't mind spending out £1000+ on a new PC. I just don't think thats neccessary.

I could possibly see a 5870 as another upgrade (or whatever the equivelent 6 series is).

As has been suggested, I will sit down with him and work out where the upgrades are needed. I think he's primarily just looking at making vidoe editing as fast as possible. With games a side issue.

Hi All

Sorry to bump an old thread but we're sorting this at the moment.

He's decided to go for new memory. Some 24GB (6x4gb) sticks or corsair vengance ram I think. But it's only 1.5v rather than 1.65, will this cause a problem???

Quote:

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Originally Posted by adz08

Hi All

Sorry to bump an old thread but we're sorting this at the moment.

He's decided to go for new memory. Some 24GB (6x4gb) sticks or corsair vengance ram I think. But it's only 1.5v rather than 1.65, will this cause a problem???

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I don't think it'll improve things, but let us know. 1.5v RAM is fine, just check your motherboards compatibility list (or the RAMs compatibility list) if you want to be sure - some boards are a little picky. And you obviously need an OS licensed to use that amount of ram (ie not home premium).

If video editing is the priority in terms of perfromance gains, make sure he's done everything he can to optimise the software configuration, especially in terms of sratch disks, and very fast ones, befroe doing anything else. Then, find out what hardware will be used by his video app, and if there's any accelerat5ion to be had from, for example, graphics cards, then make sure whatever he gets complies with the app's exact requirements.

After that, I'd suspect the SSD route has most merit.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by shaithis

I would do some investigation work first.

Get him to show you what games are slow....decide if it is a GPU or CPU problem first. An un-overclocked 920 could seem a tad slow in some games. Give it an overclock (if only temporarily) to confirm.

Then fire up resource monitor and get him to show you what video editing stuff is slow. You will be able to tell from the disk queue length and CPU utilisation whether it's the disk or CPU that is bottle-necking him.

From there, you will be much better informed before spending his money ;)

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This I think is a prime thing.

The speed issue could more than well be a perception or PEBKAC issue ;)
an SSD to replace the Velociraptor as an OS driver would help here, I doubt you get much improvement in video editing as such but it will make the pc "feel" snappier and faster
that and overclocking it a bit ;) Still on stock cooler? if so then replacing that with an all-in-one water cooler (corsair h20 or antec Khuler) as it looks and sounds far more impressive than a stock cooler ;)

Thanks,

I'll be overclocking his CPU, I think he's got one of them Thermaltake Ultra 120's or something? So should be up to a bit of OC'ing.

We've agreed to leave the GPU upgrade til later in the year. I want to see whats running slow first!

24GB ram is a bit over the top but it's what he wants! Will be better than 6GB either way.

I'll have to check how he's using Adobe Premier, I think he uses the raid 0 as a scratch disk. Was thinking of switching this out for an SSD, what size would be needed if its just a scratch disk? (I know nothing about Adobe Premier!)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by adz08

24GB ram is a bit over the top but it's what he wants! Will be better than 6GB either way.

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I'm not sure it will be, but am interested to find out otherwise :)

Am I missing something but i7s use triple channel ram and should be bought in packs of three sticks?

Get him to buy you slap up dinner with what hes saved on the budget!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Domestic_Ginger

Am I missing something but i7s use triple channel ram and should be bought in packs of three sticks?

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Well they can run perfectly fine in dual channel as well. However 24gb is a multiple of three so you just put 3x8gb or 6x4gb ;)

Yeah it's 6 x 4GB sticks. So still triple channel.

I've just installed the memory and am actually amazed, we tried re-encoding a project he was working on a few months back and it used 15GB of memory. So that has to be a big improvement over 6GB. Unfortunately he didn't take a note of how long encoding took last time round but he's able to still work is a big bonus.

I've managed to get his CPU to 3.2 GHz on the cooler he's got. Pretty sure I could get more out of if it had one of them H70 coolers on it.

Like others have said you could potentially see a massive boost in performace if he shifted his OS and apps onto an SSD. For instance running OS and apps on this drive http://www.scan.co.uk/products/corsa...0mb-s-85k-iops would yeild an impressive boost.

It's something on the list to upgrade, but he wants to see how more memory and the overclock do first. Agree it would make a massive difference to load times though.