Couple of questions on an upgrade

[garypants]

With the prices of memory dropping was thinking of trying out Vista 64bit with 8gb of memory. Just wanted to know if its worth doing. Woud I see massive improvements? How is Vista nowadays compared to the release versions? Anything I should note before doing it?

Or could you recommend a different upgrade. Budget is £300 and no more ($445 for any US folk wanting to have their say)

Upgrade is mainly to speed thing up abit, after seeing poor response times and load times. My graphics card is fine for what I do.

Thanks

Current system
e6300 @ stock
gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
2gb corsair DDR2 5400
gigabyte 8600 GT 512mb
250gb seagate
480w thermaltake
windows xp

 

[slomo4sho]

Well what do you run on your PC? More memory is usually better but you will most likely not utilize anything over 4gb. So any additional ram added will only provide minimal performance boost unless your doing something that is very CPU intensive like video editing.

I would actually recommend upgrading to a quad core before going to 8gb of ram.

Unless your dissatisfied with the current performance of your PC, I would suggest that you wait a year and just pick up Windows 7 instead of having to channel more of your hard earned money to Microsoft again next year.

 

[garypants]

Didnt really know about Windows 7 until you said, haven't been reading much. That said Windows 7 would be expected to fall into the same problems as Vista did on release. I dont mind buying Vista now, but how do people feel about it?

As for the quad core, which one would you recommend?

 

[serpent1202]

Responce times and load times relate to hard drive speeds. Your current machine should be able to run anything you throw at it, but if your looking to get into windows faster, have programs open faster etc, you really only need to upgrade the Hard drive.

I'd probably get a WD RaptorX 300 gig, or if you really want to blow the doors off everything and spend a big chunk, get the new Intel SSD's that has 0.1 response time and read speeds of up to 250 mb/s.

2 years ago I upgraded from a WD 160 gig 7200rpm drive to a 10k rpm raptor drive and it was amazing to see how big of a bottleneck the hard drive was.

If I were you though, I'd wait. SSD's are evolving at an amazing pace. Samsung is about to release a 256 gig model with similiar performace to the intel drive that is sure to drive prices down.

Hope this helps.

 

[alvine]

for that money i would get a quadcore, like q6600 and overclock it to 3.0ghz
that would be good improvement and they are dirt cheap

 

[serpent1202]

Going from a 6300 to a 6600, you would notice almost nothing. Unless your doing crazy video editing, insane multitasking, or something that isn't anywhere near average computing/gaming.

If you want to squeze extra power out of your CPU, overclock it, that CPU will handle a rather substantial OC.

Upgrade the harddrive, you won't regret it.