Tony Camonte
13 years ago
I have a PC I built a few months back. It has:
3 ghz AMD Athlon II X4 Propus
4 GB Kingston HyperEX Blu 1333 mhz RAM
2 TB 5400 RPM Samsung HD
Asus M4A88TD-M mobo with integrated ATI Radeon HD 4250 video
Windows 7 64 bit ultimate + Firefox 8 with adblock
Also a Blu-Ray reader and ancient IDE DVD-RW
Now this was just intended as a cheap computer for multimedia and web browsing, not a game machine or anything. But still the performance leaves something to be desired. There are two problems, really:
I like to have a lot of stuff open at once. Especially, lots of browser tabs open, Not infrequently, as many as 5-12 windows open, each with about 5-10 tabs per window. This really tends to kill performance, though. First, web videos like flash or youtube start skipping. Then everything gets sluggish and there's a lot of disk activity, until eventually it becomes super-annoying (like it takes 10 seconds to do stuff like switch programs) and firefox will sometimes crash. Oddly enough, the RAM rarely fills up completely, and often the slowdown starts even when RAM use is at 50% or less.
The other problem is video. I don't play video games on it but I do like to play 1080p video, both blu rays and mp4/mkv files on the hard drive. It tends to stutter, and there is also a problem of tearing the persists to a lesser degree even with vsync enabled (this also happens with low-res videos). It depends on the program, though. VLC, which I normally prefer, is terrible. MPC home cinema is a lot better, while WMP 11 is pretty smooth but I hate everything else about the program. And having lots of other stuff open worsens things it seems.
So...I have some money to make some improvements in the old system,,,given my uses for it, what would help the most? Upgrading the RAM? Buying an SSD? And would a better graphics card help the video thing? How much better would it need to be?
Thanks!