i5-3570 feels like Core 2 Duo

ZoRiii

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Oct 13, 2016
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I don't know why, but I use the same graphics card (GT 1030) and hard drive (WD Blue w/ 1TB) as I did with my old Inspiron with a Core 2 Duo. The only difference is the type of ram. The thing is, it is still slow, like loading pictures, or opening the file explorer would take about the same my old Core 2 Duo would. I have since disabled the Superfetch service, because of disk usage, but should I actually turn it back on if I am experiencing this? I game a lot on here so I don't really know since I never really saw any lag with Superfetch on. I don't know if it would just randomly start lagging my game if I do turn it back on. Can someone help me? Thank you.
 
Solution

Swapping and lack of spare RAM for caching will ruin your performance no matter how much faster the CPU might be. Upgrading to at least 8GB of RAM should help considerably.

Personally, I wouldn't go below 16GB. I haven't done anything special on my PC since the last time I have rebooted it and I'm already using 13GB of RAM. I'd likely be miserable with only 8GB.

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
How much RAM did you have in your old vs new PCs? If you had 4GB of RAM and still have 4GB of RAM, the reason why your system still feels pretty much the same may simply be that you are memory-bound and both systems' performance is getting dragged down by swapping. With 8GB RAM or less, there isn't much memory left for Windows to keep files in cache, so programs/games have to constantly reload stuff from HDD so you get little if any loading time improvements from upgrading the CPU and RAM there either.
 

ZoRiii

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Oct 13, 2016
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-Geekwad yes I have reinstalled the OS after putting it in this

-InvalidError Yeah I had 4 gigs in the old PC and 4 gigs in this PC. It's just the old one was DDR2 (800MHz) while this is DDR3-12800 (1600MHz).
So are you saying I should opt for 8GB? I have been thinking of getting another 4GB stick.
 

ZoRiii

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Oct 13, 2016
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I don't know whether to because of high disk usage with it. It is common for most people for superfetch to do this.
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator

Swapping and lack of spare RAM for caching will ruin your performance no matter how much faster the CPU might be. Upgrading to at least 8GB of RAM should help considerably.

Personally, I wouldn't go below 16GB. I haven't done anything special on my PC since the last time I have rebooted it and I'm already using 13GB of RAM. I'd likely be miserable with only 8GB.
 
Solution

ZoRiii

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Oct 13, 2016
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Yeah I was thinking with 12 GB since I am going to be using a lot of after effects, photoshop, things like that. But 8 might be enough.
 

ZoRiii

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Oct 13, 2016
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Also I talked about it having an affect on my disk usage. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough.
 

ZoRiii

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Oct 13, 2016
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Yeah that is crazy how you can get SSD's for so cheap. I have been thinking of that too.
 

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator

Nope, the biggest bang-per-buck you get performance-wise is getting enough RAM to get swapping under control. Not even an SSD will save you from massive performance degradation if the OS needs to swap every time you try to do anything, your CPU ends up bottlenecked by the SSD instead of the HDD. If you try running a workload that could really use 8+GB on a system that has only 4GB of RAM and an SSD, you may quickly rip through the SSD's program-erase life.

I've been in a similar situation before (running a 16+GB workload on a 8GB Core2) and my HDDs were seeing ~50MB/s of aggregate writes to make it barely bearable. No doubt an SSD would have more than doubled the performance I could squeeze out of my Core2 back then, but most SSDs wouldn't survive a constant 100+MB/s of writes (~1000 drive writes per month for a 240GB SSD) for very long.
 

ZoRiii

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Oct 13, 2016
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Alright update, after getting another 4GB, I can assure everything was running a lot faster. Windows had enough ram to use and everything was opening a lot faster.