It came to my attention just now that in 2 days I will have been posting to this blog for a full year – the longest I’ve ever kept a blog going for. I wanted to post weekly but I knew from the beginning that wouldn’t happen, but I’ve made sure I’ve posted at least once a month so that’s an achievement.
It was my birthday yesterday and as a present to myself (seeing how I don’t get presents like when I was a kid where I was spoiled more!) I bought myself a new PC! My last one was built 4 1/2 years ago with money from my first job as I had never owned a decent PC before then. I can’t believe this one has lasted me 4 1/2 years and it was still fairly quick. The only upgrade it’s had since it was built was Windows when new versions came out and a new HDD and later an SSD. Nothing else was changed in that entire time, not even memory or graphics card.
I’m not a patient person and computers being slow annoys me the most. If I click something, I expect it to do it instantly. Even though I grew up in the age of Celeron processors and 256MB RAM as a main PC, I never did learn to live with the slowness.
So you might ask what I had before and what I upgraded to. Well here’s a quick run down:
Old PC
Core2Duo E6750 2.66GHz
ASUS P5K-E WiFi
4GB OCZ DDR2-800
Sapphire HD (ATi Radeon HD) 3870 O/C Edition 512MB
Hiper 580w PSU
2x80GB RAID0 (replaced with 64GB OCZ Vertex 2e SSD)
2x250GB RAID0
New PC
Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz
ASUS P8Z77-E LX
8GB G-Skill DDR3 2133MHz
Sapphire HD (AMD Radeon HD) 7770 O/C Edition 1GB
Hiper 580w PSU
64GB OCZ Vertex 2e SSD
2x250GB RAID0
Total cost: £430 delivered from ebuyer.com (cheap compared to a year ago, and compared to my old PC which was £620 new!)
As you can see I’m re-using some parts between machines as there is nothing wrong with the old HDD’s or the PSU. The next thing on my list might be a nice case or two new full HD monitors, I’ve not decided yet since it’s all about money! I also want to find the right deal on the monitors since I’ll be wanting 2 for my dual screens.
The speed difference between these machines is quite large. Boot up time had dropped by 2/3 down to just 24 seconds to the desktop, including BIOS and password screen. The machine is instantly usable when it hits the desktop even though it’s loading in the background still, which the old PC would make you wait about 5-10 seconds before it would open anything.
Installing Windows 7 SP1 tonight took 4 minutes! And it included 3 reboots! That took at least 3-4x longer on the old PC, so I was quite surprised. The difference a new CPU, memory and motherboard can make is immense. The SSD certainly helps any machine however so that should be your first upgrade point if the rest of your hardware is fairly good.
I’ve tried a few games, but one of the games I really wanted to try was Flight Simulator X, one I could never run on decent graphics because my system was too slow. Now I can happily run it on full graphics and still get about 30fps! The big downer is that it’s not multi-threaded, so it just maxes out a single CPU core. I suspect the CPU was always the bottleneck on my old PC.
Minecraft (as crap as Java is) now runs with virtually no lag compared to random bouts of it on my old PC. That’s pleased me a fair bit as the lagging often made it unplayable.
As for others, I’ll get to test those properly at the upcoming LAN party at my friends house in a couple of weeks.