Rebiuld of old system

[Rowanmk]

Hi All,

I will start with saying I am a complete amateur and any advise I get will be more than welcom and (hopeully) valuable.
I have an existing PC which I think might have one or two decent components, but these components (the good, the bad and the ugly ones) have been borrowed and purchased at different times and now is the time to give this machine a new start.

I currently have the following:
CPU: Intel Core i7 CPU 860 @ 2.8 GHz (L2 CacheSize: 1024)
Board: BIOSTAR Group TP55
Bus Clock: 133 megahertz
MEMORY: 2 x 4GB SDRAM
HARDDISK: SAMSUNG HD200HJ ATA Devce (TurboPC)
GRAPHICS: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250

As mentioned already, I am a compete amateur so I am unsure of the above info is sufficient to give me some advise on what is worthy tokeep and what can be tossed on the heap.
I am using the computer today mainly for phtoshop and Vegas Movie Sudio HD so i would liketo have somethig that can perform well. I m running Windows 7 Ultimate.
Please lt me have some thoughts and avise on what I should be looking at.

Many thanks
Rowan

 

[smorizio]

there all parts that still have some life to them. i hold off on replacing the cpu/mb till next year or the year after when haswell comes out the i7 you have still fine for photo and games as you have 8g of ram with it. i het a 128g sata for my boot drive and another hard drive when you get the cash just make the ssd the boot drive with windows and photo/video edit software on it.
i have the 250 video card it not a bad card...the one up from that is the 550ti and the 560ti till the 660ti comes out.

 

[geofelt]

Your PC actually looks very good. A couple of generations old, but still effective.
Your graphics card is fine for non gaming use.

As I see it, the weakest part is the hard drive. Unlike your description, it actually is a Sata based drive.
For general work, a SSD is a great performance upgrade.
A SSD would do wonders.
For reliability, I would buy Intel or Samsung.
A 180gb Intel 330 SSD is $145 after rebate for example. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167122
One reason I suggest Intel is that they have a free migration tool that will clone your hard drive to a ssd.
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=19324

Photoshop can use lots of ram to improve processing speed.
Adding another 8gb would not be expensive.

If you want to do significantly better, you are looking at a cpu& motherboard change.

 

[Rowanmk]

Thanks very much for the response geofelt.
I will de3finately look into the SSD as an alternative. Question though, the drives seem to be relatively small...only up to about 256 Gb. Do youonly use this for the operating system and day to day files? Would I then keep the old HDD for the storage of all Music, Photos and Videos?
And one or two other questions from your mail:
- Is all RAM equal? Are certain brnads better than others etc?
- A reccomendation on a Motherboard upgrade for the CPU I have?

 

[geofelt]

Yes, you can buy larger SSD's, but they are relatively expensive per gb.

Because of that, the best use for a ssd is for the os and apps.
Photo's are small enough to keep on a ssd.

If you have large files, like video files, they are best kept on cheaper conventional hard drives.
Don't know the size of music files.

For the most part, there is not much difference in DDR3 ram.
I think some brands might be better. Either because of better quality control, or by superior customer service.

So long as your motherboard is functioning, any sort of a change using the same cpu would give you no performance benefit.