Real World Data

[qtoche]

I have relied on Tom's Hardware for reviews, previews, charts and comparisons for many years now. I think that this is a great site for helping me make educated purchaces of computer hardware. I do like the technical comparison of products and the level of detail, however I have realized that high performance in certain tasks does not translate to high performance in the every day tasks that I use my computer for. Specifically, load time for windows, programs and web pages, and fps for games are what I am interested in. I am able to get all the information for gaming, but most of the hardware reviews for other tasks only cover obscure details like 4kb random writes, pcmark results etc. I am sad to say that every pc upgrade that I have had with two exceptions have been pretty disappointing. SSD hard drives and upgraded graphics cards both have had phenominal results, cpu, ram, mobo, etc have not been so impressive. I would like to see more comparison in terms of everyday computing such as windows load times, etc. I realize that there will not be much of a difference in these tasks between parts, but it is nice to see when this is true and when it is not.

I seem to keep my core components for a long time. Mobo, Ram, CPU, and upgrade the gpu and now to SSD as these components translate into huge improvements for me. I know that some people use their machines very differently, video and audio encoding seem to be very dependent on up to date hardware..... but not internet browsing, or really even gaming since I max out quality settings and depend on the gpu to be the bottleneck.

 

[amuffin]

When you build a pc, you want to have the most balanced system. So you don't want a high end processor and a low end board, or low end processor and high end board, this is an example of course. But in real world scenarios, it truly depends on what the user wants to accomplish. There will literally be no difference in common tasks between a 300mb read/write ssd and a 500mb read/write ssd, except for benchmarks. There is also something good about overclocking, say your system feels slow or your processor seems slow because you perform cpu intensive tasks or play games that are cpu intensive. By raising the frequency you can get more performance out of your processor without spending too much. This is why I always suggest a "K" unlocked core i series cpu over a non K processor, for the fact that you can keep pushing the processor up in frequency to perform near/outperform the newer processors.

 

[unksol]

motherboards don't affect performance they affect what you can do. Features and sockets change and that's really the only reason to upgrade one, if you can't do what you want. (overclocking, usb3.0, processor change)

Memory wont really matter once you're over 4-8 gigs. as long as you have enough to not use virtual memory its not going to matter. speed doesn't make much difference outside of benchmarks either.

CPU can bottleneck games so you can't just assume its the GPU you wont really see any improvement in regular use though, or any improvement at all if yih weren't already maxing it out at some point.

Bottom line they don't make much difference at all in daily use (internet, email). really there's no reason. to upgrade them unless you need to do something they can't. (you're running out of memory, the cpu is at full load) and you'll only see improvements when doing those specific things