Upgrade CPU or not and NVMe runaround

Strangefan

It's all about archetecture these days, raw GHz is OK but even my upgrade from a ryzen 2700x to a 5600x which is a drop of 2 cores gave me a significant boost, 

Jaycee

Strangefan said:

It's all about archetecture these days, raw GHz is OK but even my upgrade from a ryzen 2700x to a 5600x which is a drop of 2 cores gave me a significant boost, 

Thanks, "Sum of the parts" type of thing

Jaycee

Jaycee said:

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

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

NVIDIA GeForce GT 710  gpu

*8 gb ram

 I use Affinity photo  for photo editing

Looking to buy the following .....

AMD Ryzen 5 5600G 3.9GHz  

Kingston FURY Beast 8GB x 2

MSI B550-A PRO ATX Motherboard

Will my old NVIDIA gpu provide better graphics than the inbuilt one on the Amd cpu?

Bidley

It very much depends on what GPU it is. AMD APUs are good but not usually better than a discrete GPU, unless it's really old or a GT 1030 or something.

What speed is the RAM? Ryzen loves fast memory.

Jaycee

Bidley said:

It very much depends on what GPU it is. AMD APUs are good but not usually better than a discrete GPU, unless it's really old or a GT 1030 or something.

What speed is the RAM? Ryzen loves fast memory.

NVIDIA GeForce GT 710  gpu

Ram is 3200 Mhz

crunchman

Jaycee said:

Will my old NVIDIA gpu provide better graphics than the inbuilt one on the Amd cpu?

No

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-5-5600g-review/3

If you look at the bottom of the page, that has the inbuilt GPU on a Ryzen 5 a bit faster than a GT 1030, so it will completely stomp all over a 710.

Jaycee

Thanks guys, interesting chart on Toms hardware. I may up the speed on the memory and take it from there.

swiller

Have you thought about the hard disk being the cause for sluggishness? If motherboard can take it, nvme (cheap) running OS and programs might just do it. 

crunchman

swiller said:

Have you thought about the hard disk being the cause for sluggishness? If motherboard can take it, nvme (cheap) running OS and programs might just do it. 

A SATA solid state drive will make a huge difference if the PC still has a conventional hard drive.  Much more difference than a new CPU and motherboard.  I was looking at a PC the other day that runs like a slug.  Task Manager showed the (not very fast) CPU loafing along at about 10% while the hard drive was constantly maxed out at 100%.

Jaycee

swiller said:

Have you thought about the hard disk being the cause for sluggishness? If motherboard can take it, nvme (cheap) running OS and programs might just do it. 

crunchman said:

swiller said:

Have you thought about the hard disk being the cause for sluggishness? If motherboard can take it, nvme (cheap) running OS and programs might just do it. 

A SATA solid state drive will make a huge difference if the PC still has a conventional hard drive.  Much more difference than a new CPU and motherboard.  I was looking at a PC the other day that runs like a slug.  Task Manager showed the (not very fast) CPU loafing along at about 10% while the hard drive was constantly maxed out at 100%.

It is a dual core i3 3.7Ghz.  The OS is on an ssd  and I have a hdd where I keep everything else. I did a complete re-instalation of windows which improved things a lo. I built it in 2014 so it is due for an upgrade and I recently took up pohotography, so could do with the extra processing power and make it future proof for a few years.

crunchman

Having the OS on an SSD is the key thing.  In that case a motherboard / CPU / memory combo should be a good upgrade.

The only thing to check there is whether you are getting good bang for buck.  You might find someone upgrading from something like a Ryzen 3600X selling it on a motherboard on Ebay.

crosstownvamp

Jaycee said:

Thanks guys, interesting chart on Toms hardware. I may up the speed on the memory and take it from there.

You won't notice the difference increasing ram speed.

I just did this exercise with my very old Dell i7. I fitted a new mobo, a Ryzen 4500 and 16gb of ram for £180 from CCL. I already had an SSD and newish PSU but it's night and day. I also took the graphics card out and took the fan to bits to remove loads of fluff and thermal paste that was like plaster and the card now runs 40 degrees cooler.

Jaycee

I went for a Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite AX V2, 16gb ram and Ryzen 5 5600 cpu.

The only problem is everytime I connect the second hdd it wont boot. It gets stuck on the select drive to boot from which I do but still wont boot. Any ideas why?  

Sorted it out. I installed ccleaner which had a 14 day pro version to try. Updated all the drivers turned the machine off, connected the hdd and it appeared

Jaycee

A year on and the machine is nice and stable apart from a BSOD a few months ago.

Here are my specs :

Motherboard Gigabyte Aorus B550 Elite AX V2

Processor AMD Ryzen 5 5600G with Radeon Graphics 3.90 GHz

Installed RAM 16.0 GB 2 slots empty

System type 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor

Main drive 240 gb ssd  (which has windows installed on it)

2nd drive 1tb hdd

500 gb NVMe

Mainly used for online stuff, light office work and Photshop photo editing.

Is there anything that jumps out at you that says "he could do with........"?

swiller

If not already, run the OS and programs from the nvme, not the "Main" if thats what main drive means.

Jaycee

swiller said:

If not already, run the OS and programs from the nvme, not the "Main" if thats what main drive means.

Yes windows on the "main"  just added that onto the specs, thanks

digitalscream

Any particular reason you didn't install Windows on the NVMe drive? The system would likely feel noticeably snappier if you did.

Jaycee

digitalscream said:

Any particular reason you didn't install Windows on the NVMe drive? The system would likely feel noticeably snappier if you did.

Yes,  I bought it last week ........

swiller

Jaycee said:

swiller said:

If not already, run the OS and programs from the nvme, not the "Main" if thats what main drive means.

Yes windows on the "main"  just added that onto the specs, thanks

No probs, as DS suggests, it will make a BIG difference, shit off a shovel territory in terms of speed all round. You can get free software to clone the SSD to the NVME, cant remember what they are, but easy to find with an hour or so homework. Then boot from NVME in the bios, off you go. E2A but dont just try copy paste all from SSD to NVME within windows. Needs cloning software for pain free transfer.

Emp_Fab

Simonh said:

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

Ok, so you said an SSD is not always faster but then gave only examples of how SSDs are faster.  When are mechanical drives faster than SSDs then ?