Time To Upgrade, Part 2: Picking The Parts To Replace

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After looking at whether or not it makes sense to replace a PC built back in 2007 with a more modern machine, we decided to examine three component upgrade options—graphics, storage, and the motherboard/CPU/RAM platform—separately.

Scenario 3 Results: PCMark Vantage

Finally, we replaced the Western Digital Raptor hard drive with G.Skill's Phoenix SSD. Despite its 100 GB capacity, the drive delivers more than twice WD's maximum throughput, blistering minimum transfer rates, and many dozen times the hard drive's I/O performance. In some tests, the SSD is hundreds of times faster than the hard drive.

The HDD benchmark shows the SSD being 7x faster, and all other tests show the SSD as superior.