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| Thread ID: 72696 | 2006-09-22 21:00:00 | What Components Matter in a New PC | pctek (84) | PC World Chat |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 486697 | 2006-09-22 21:00:00 | A friend has recently upgraded to: x2 4200+ Socket AM2 MB 1 Gb DDR2-667 7800GT 250Gb sata HDD from XP2000+ Socket A MB 1 Gb DDR266 Ti4200 250Gb sata HDD he wrote: "I've ripped several DVDs, authored heaps, and finally installed my TV card and recorded and dubbed some programmes, and I can safely say there is NO noticeable difference in processing speed. Perhaps slightly less CPU load (in Task Manager), but no perceived difference in data processing or authoring speed. The bottleneck is the HDD and the DVD, which makes sense, as the biggest improvement on my old system was when I got the new drive. I'd say the HDD is the single most important item required to build a fast PC (only average CPU req). Because it's actually the slowest data pump, means it's the biggest bottleneck." But then we all know hardware upgrades are driven by gaming. Still interesting about the CPU - take note those who are thinking of changing from a perfectly good current CPU just to get a Conroe. |
pctek (84) | ||
| 486698 | 2006-09-22 21:12:00 | I think the problem is that what your friend is doing is all very hard-drive intensive. Video capture/encoding relies on reading and writing a lot of data to the hard drive, so he's right in saying that that's where the bottleneck is. He might want to consider a RAID hard drive setup, as that would improve the performance of accessing the hard drive, and for what he's doing, should mean a noticable difference. | somebody (208) | ||
| 486699 | 2006-09-22 21:41:00 | And SATA 2 would help. | Greg (193) | ||
| 486700 | 2006-09-22 23:02:00 | Could even be the software ... (or OS). I've heard this a few times when upgrading people though: "it is no faster". I suspect they are judging this on the time to launch apps and their hard drive speeds will be pretty close to what they had.. |
gibler (49) | ||
| 486701 | 2006-09-22 23:30:00 | And SATA 2 would help. Really? A 7200 RPM drive is just as fast on IDE as on SATA, so why would all the potential speed make a difference to a drive that has no chance of using all that bandwidth? |
Greven (91) | ||
| 486702 | 2006-09-23 00:30:00 | Really? A 7200 RPM drive is just as fast on IDE as on SATA, so why would all the potential speed make a difference to a drive that has no chance of using all that bandwidth? Agreed! SATA2 is a bit of a gimmick, if hes working with alot of video he might be one of the few that would benefit from RAID. If your friend was to choose his software carefully he could theoretically gain a considerable performance boost with that new PC when ripping DVDs. Using software that is multithreaded (not hard to find for video work) and supports nVidias PureVideo (a smidgeon harder). There was an article on Anandtech a few months back where they tested ATIs Avivo technology and with a X1800XT manage to encode an entire DVD in around 30min. I thought that was fairly impressive, it normally takes me about 2hrs to encode the video on my 2.3GHz Athlon. |
Pete O'Neil (6584) | ||
| 486703 | 2006-09-23 00:47:00 | Funny that, My 3500 is noticibly faster then the 3000 it replaced, Both are much faster then my rig running an old Socket A 3200 and all three of them kill my rig running a Socket A 2400. | Metla (12) | ||
| 486704 | 2006-09-23 01:12:00 | I have a Seagate 120Gb IDE 2mb cache HDD. He has the Seagate 250Gb sata. I remember when he first got the drive on his old system we both ran some HDD tests and yes, his won by miles. Even though I had better other components. He isn't saying there was no point in the upgrade - one of the main reasons he did it was gaming, where of course it does make a difference. As far as the DVD stuff goes, I thought it was interesting as what he is saying is his HDD made a big difference - however he has the same one in this system and he was a bit disappointed the CPU didn't help with this particular use as much as he thought it might have. However I wasn't that surprised.....most of the innovations with CPUs now isn't about speed, its instructions sets, double cores and so on, stuff that depends on what app you run. And all my upgrades never made much difference to how well Excel performs as far as I can tell.....:lol: |
pctek (84) | ||
| 486705 | 2006-09-23 12:30:00 | Really? A 7200 RPM drive is just as fast on IDE as on SATA, so why would all the potential speed make a difference to a drive that has no chance of using all that bandwidth?Simple. Given the same spindle speed of the hard drive (and of course other mechanical limitations) it's the speed of data to and from the drive that counts. A drive with SATA will transfer input/output data faster than PATA. And a drive with SATA 2 will transfer data faster than SATA. |
Greg (193) | ||
| 486706 | 2006-09-23 22:09:00 | Simple. Given the same spindle speed of the hard drive (and of course other mechanical limitations) it's the speed of data to and from the drive that counts. A drive with SATA will transfer input/output data faster than PATA. And a drive with SATA 2 will transfer data faster than SATA. Howeever given that the physical speed of the drive isn't yet fast enough to keep up with the amount of data a PATA connection can supply it yet, let alone a SATA or even SATA 2 connection, the connection type once again pales into insignificance |
lagbort (5041) | ||
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