Upgrade CPU or not and NVMe runaround

Jaycee

I mainly use my computer for online, zoom (ing)  office suite music listening. 

I have nocticed recenlty that it is getting a bit sluggish, nothing to bad.  When I built it I put it together with a future upgrade in mind as funds allowed, with that in mind I put a dual core i3 3.7 Ghz which  has seved me well.

The i7 4Ghz quad core can be had for about £125 on Ebay which in my mind looks like a good option for the next few years.

 Intel Core i3-4170 3.7 GHz Dual-Core Processor.....

Asus H81M-PLUS Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard....

my cpu and mb with 8 gig of memory

Simonh

More RAM will probably be better than more CPU, more both will be more better

Cirrus

I think that degree of a CPU upgrade would be noticeable for some uses, but at times when your computer is sluggish it might be worth pulling up task manager and seeing where the bottleneck is - Simonh is right, quite often, especially if you've got lots of internet tabs open, it'll be memory that you're running out of. Whereas if you're playing games or doing mixing, raw CPU calculating power is often the bottleneck.

That said, IIRC the i7 is likely to be able to access your existing RAM faster than the i3, so there might still be some advantage in upgrading it.

Simonh

Cirrus said:

 Simonh is right, quite often.

Can I just quote snip that and pretend you meant something else entirely?

you are right about the CPU, there will be some benefit of that on it's own but it depends entirely on use case, if you have a task specific build like video rendering, or post processing etc then CPU specification becomes quite important, not just speed and number of cores but things like FSB etc.

for generic use then almost always more RAM is much more important than more CPU - and it is usually much cheaper as well.

Simonh

I've just noticed the first line of your post says what you use the machine for - go for RAM not CPU, 24-32gb should be the sweet spot I would have thought.

Cirrus

Simonh said:

Cirrus said:

 Simonh is right, quite often.

Can I just quote snip that and pretend you meant something else entirely?

Yes, get that locked and loaded for the politics sub 

Danny1969

For office, zoom and music listening you probably don't need more ram or a faster CPU. A clean load will speed things up, a swap to an internal SSD would also be good if you currently have a rotational drive. 

Basically if the machine can't pull the info off the drive quickly it doesn't matter what CPU you have or how much ram. 

Back your stuff up and reload it then see how you do. Windows tends to get slower and slower over the years if not reloaded. A reload will probably speed it up considerably 

Simonh

Danny1969 said:

For office, zoom and music listening you probably don't need more ram or a faster CPU. A clean load will speed things up, a swap to an internal SSD would also be good if you currently have a rotational drive. 

Basically if the machine can't pull the info off the drive quickly it doesn't matter what CPU you have or how much ram. 

Back your stuff up and reload it then see how you do. Windows tends to get slower and slower over the years if not reloaded. A reload will probably speed it up considerably 

This can be a bit of a misconception as well, SSD is not always faster than a spinning platter, they are much better than they used to be but again use case matters. SSD deliver exceptional benefit when doing long sequential reads or writes, for random writes (such as zoom calls or web browsing) the ability to write to the currently available bit of the drive instantly is probably better. For something doing lots of reads then SSD generally is better, but again holding all this in lots of lovely RAM is better still

Simonh

Cirrus said:

Simonh said:

Cirrus said:

 Simonh is right, quite often.

Can I just quote snip that and pretend you meant something else entirely?

Yes, get that locked and loaded for the politics sub 

I am just going to reply to everything in there with that snip!

Jaycee

Thanks for the replies guys, I have a 240 gig ssd, with a 1tb hdd.  it's been 6 years now since I put the machine together so a fresh install may be the thing, and see where I am at after that.

Heartfeltdawn

Cirrus said:

Yes, get that locked and loaded for the politics sub 

WiresDreamDisasters

I actually got an i7 Haswell sat here not doing much, with mobo+ram+case+psu. Just needs a gpu and hard drives adding to it. It was my old studio machine before I upgraded to my Ryzen 5950X setup. If that sort of thing interests you, chuck us a PM.

guitartango

Jaycee said:

Thanks for the replies guys, I have a 240 gig ssd, with a 1tb hdd.  it's been 6 years now since I put the machine together so a fresh install may be the thing, and see where I am at after that.

Have you applied any firmware updates to the SSD ? Also the large drive maybe slowing the machine down?

Have you run any smart tools against it ?

https://hddscan.com/

 Depending on your SSD

 Kingston https://support.kingston.com/Solid-State-Drives/A400-SATA-SSD/2253044341/SSD-Firmware-Update.htm

 Intel https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/articles/000006425/memory-and-storage.html

At work I have seen quite a few SSD's fail compared to standard disks

Axe_meister

First. Have you had a look at the heat sink and Fan? If not it:s probably clogged with dust. Which may make it thermal throttle. Just a blast with a can of compressed air may speed things up.
A Windows reload would certainly be a good idea. 8GB is really a bare minimum these days. Have you seen how much memory chrome takes up? 
In single threaded workloads you won't see much difference in performance with an i7 if the same generation but multi threaded workloads you will, or if you are doing lots of things at the same time, i.e. surfing/emailing/watching porn at the same time as your Zoom meeting.
I'd go clean PC first, then Windows reload, then memory then CPU.

crunchman

By the time you do memory and CPU you are only a motherboard away from being able to get something more recent.  You tend to pay a premium for a older i7s as people with i3s and i5s will be after them.  There might be better value in a more recent i5.  It might be a better option to look out for a motherboard/CPU/memory combo.

You are talking £125 for the CPU alone for the 4th gen i7.  Then you will need to buy some memory.  Even with second hand memory, you are probably in the £150 region.  I just found a completed listing for an 8th gen i5 on a motherboard with 16GB of RAM installed that sold for £204.

If you sold yours as a combo, that should make up the difference and you have an 8th gen processor for the same money as a 4th gen processor.  Yes it's an i5 rather than an i7, but I'd probably go for the i5 that's 4 generations newer.

There are also some listings on Ebay for AMD Ryzen 2600 and 2600x CPUs bundled on a motherboard.  You would need to add memory to those, but by the time you sold your existing motherboard/CPU/memory, you would probably have to put in less than £50 more than buying the 4th gen i7.  The benchmarks on a Ryzen 2600 are about twice as fast as a 4th gen i7.  The 2600x would be a bit faster still.

Jaycee

Thanks again for the replies, even more to consider.

As I said earlier it has been six years since I put my current rig together, and tech' never stops.......

fastonebaz

I3 are rubbish and slow get an i7 already. 

Jaycee

I reset the computer this morning, will see how it runs over the next few days

TheMarlin

SSD will probably give best improvement 

Jaycee

TheMarlin said:

SSD will probably give best improvement 

I have an ssd, the hdd is for pics, music and anything else ,

Jaycee

After the reset the computer has worked well, but it is a little slow.

I have been researching the latest CPU's and finding out what is out there, just concentrating on intel for the moment.

I have a , 4th gen i3 3.6GHz dual core, I was surprised that an 11th gen i5 2.6GHz which has six cores, has a better single thread rating even tho' it is 1GHz slower. I guess things have improved so much over the last six plus years