Upgrade time - your thoughts

[Titus A Duxass]

At the moment my wife's PC is a bog standard setup which I think we actually bought off the shelf.
It's main components are:
AMD Athlon XP 900 MHz
ASRock K7VT4A+ Motherboard
Samsung 160gb IDE HDD
758mb of RAM

Now the majority of use is emailing and surfing but in the last couple of days I have been doing some scanning, printing and CD ripping. This has highlighted that this box is dog slow.

Checking with Glassmonitor shows that nearly every action results in maximum CPU usage with close to maximum RAM usage.

My wife commented that she finds the pooter dead slow compared to her freinds laptop, she wants something done about it!

So it's time to upgrade. I have a budget of 300 Euros.
By chance I fell on an article in the Daily Telegraph about building a Vista ready pooter for around 200UKP (300 Euros approx.), this is what he recommends:
Celeron D351 3.2ghz Processor
Asrock 775i945GZ motherboard
Maxton DMax10 SATA2 80gb HDD
1gb of DDR2 Ram

This seems a good amount of back for your bucks.
Remembering that it is mainly for surfing, emailing, photowork, scanning and no gaming.

Am I going to see a major change in performance?

Is it worth going this route?

Ladies & Gentlemen your thoughts comments,recommendations, etc.

[maniacmusician]

i think it'll definitely be worth that money, especially since you can reuse your current hard drive. Is your current RAM compatible with that new setup? but that's definitely more than enough processing power to tide you over for CD ripping and scanning.

[Titus A Duxass]

Your suggestion of reusing the hdd is interesting, are you saying the option of a SATA2 hdd is not going to make much difference.

No the RAM is not compatible.

[zgornel]

I'd recommend buying a Sempron 3000+ chip with a Socket 754 Mainboard, you can reuse hdd and memory, the Sempron is imo better than the Celeron and maybe you'll have some money left for a graphic card too :D

[mips]

I don't like Celeron cpus and do not recommend them, cache is your friend :)

What country are you from so we can see where to spend your 300euros ?

[Titus A Duxass]

I am based in Germany.

What do you mean - cache is your friend? (in simple terms please)

[mips]

I'm referring to CPU cache memory. In the Celeron range of processors the amount of cache memory is greatly reduce compared to say a Pentium D.

Cache memory greatly reduces memory access times and could mean great improvements in speed depending on the application.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_cache

http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/pentium_d.htm
http://www.intel.com/products/processor/celeron_d/index.htm

[Titus A Duxass]

Okay, after rummaging about in my pile of bits and robbing my test bench PC I now have:

PC Chips K7 Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 1500MHz
1gb of DDR400 RAM

The whole thing is faster but still uses 100% cpu for most actions. Is this 100% usage normal?

The RAM usage is now about 33% instead of nearly 100%.

The motherboard supports AMD Athlon XP and Sempron processors, will a processor upgrade make any substantial difference?

[zgornel]

No. To make the difference you have to change the CPU generation altogether. K7 CPU's are hard to find now and won't provide a significant speed improvement. Anyway, your rig can handle ubuntu pretty good, you sure you need to upgrade ?

[Titus A Duxass]

Anyway, your rig can handle ubuntu pretty good, you sure you need to upgrade ? - if you call taking about one minute to insert a graphic into the required box in Koverartist and then needing over one minute to get it to the printer, okay, then you are right my rig is okay.

Me, I find it a little slow and more than a little annoying.

[mips]

Now the majority of use is emailing and surfing but in the last couple of days I have been doing some scanning, printing and CD ripping. This has highlighted that this box is dog slow.

Checking with Glassmonitor shows that nearly every action results in maximum CPU usage with close to maximum RAM usage.


I just did a little test here on a Athlon64 3200+. Got the following apps open, Swiftfox, Skype, wxDFast, Java (cpu hog), Frostwire, Kooka, KAudioCreator.

With KDE you will usually have close to 100% mem usage as it is generally cached.

I did a simultanious scan at 600dpi and cd rip to ogg vorbis.

My cpu usage went up from about 43% to about 58% with the odd spike here and there to about 80%

[zgornel]

:D. For 300 euros you can buy a decent processor and motherboard (keeping your memory and hdd). I'd go for a Athlon64/Sempron. Do some research on the net and find prices.

[mips]

Instead of getting a faster PC have you considered removing the bloat from your OS ?

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=277090

Then there are other things to do like prelink, preload, hdparm, profile etc. Use these terms as keyword searches here and you will find many threats on those topics.

I just completed a debian sid (sidux) install on my laptop with KDE-CORE today and I must say it feels very fast. There are many things/services in Kubuntu that you don't need and could remove. The easiest way is to do a server install followed by X & kde-core. You can then customise and add stuff that you use. It's a longer process put could yield some speed advantages. Certain cpu/memory intensive processes would benefit from a hardware upgrade though.

[Titus A Duxass]

I did consider doing a server with a trimmed down install, the problem is that this takes too long for my wife!

However, I will read the thread and give it some thought.

Thanks for the guidance.

[mips]

www.alternate.de
www.pearl.de
www.conrad.de

Maybe we can find you something for your 300euro in the above sites.

[bonzodog]

Also, stay away from the PC Chips Mobo's - they are as cheap as ****, quality wise, and it won't last long. Socket 754 or 939 mobo for a decent AMD proc.

[Velotix]

OK, just so we're clear - what exactly is the maximum amount of money you're willing to spend? This will make a massive difference as to what I recommend you buy.

[mand0]

I'd say go for a 939 socket mobo with an AMD64 dual core cpu and 1 gig of RAM. It's getting to be pretty cheap now and that can handle a lot.

[mips]

AMD Athlon64 X2 System:
http://www.alternate.de/html/product/details.html?artno=GEEG01&showTechData=true
http://www.alternate.de/html/product/details.html?artno=GEEG05&showTechData=true
http://www.alternate.de/html/productDetails.html?artno=HEEA06
http://www.alternate.de/html/highlights.html?hgid=330&tgid=223&treeName=HARDWARE&Level1=Arbeitsspeicher&Level2=DDR2& Pick what you want but whatever you pick ensure you get two dimm modules and not one ! Price varies according to speed.

The above is around 300euros and should be plenty fast. You basically get 2 cpu's with the X2 amd. You could go cheaper with a asrock MB.

The AM2 socket motherboard gives you some future proofing as socket 939 is on it's way out.

You could also do a pricing exercis for the Pentium D, it might just work out cheaper and they are also Dual-Core cpu's. From reading a few of the better known performance review sites the Athlon64 X2 gets better performance than the Pentium D though.

Very important to check Motherboard chipsets vs known linux issues.

Maybe make your own list and post it here and we can advise further.

Also check the pearl site, apparently they are not as good but cheaper, conrad being the most expensive.

[mips]

OK, just so we're clear - what exactly is the maximum amount of money you're willing to spend? This will make a massive difference as to what I recommend you buy.

Well he has 300euros, if you take 1GB of ram it does not leave much for CPU & MB.

[zgornel]

That's why the AMD solution is best as long as AM2 socket is not used - and considering the budget. Using AMD there is no need in upgrading memory.

[Titus A Duxass]

Thanks for all the info. guys.
I will take a look at your links, I will avoid Pearl and Conrad (one's sells cheap sh*t and the other too expensive).

I will also take a look at my local store and see what they have to offer.

[Titus A Duxass]

This is what my local store has in offer:
http://www.compek.de/PREISLISTE/pl.pdf

The big bonus, no postage! The store is 5 mins walk from my house.

Recommendations.

They have lots of AMD processors but it all means greek to me, also the Pentium 4D seem reasonably priced.

[steven8]

Also, stay away from the PC Chips Mobo's - they are as cheap as ****, quality wise, and it won't last long

I just wiped and re-set up a 1997 computer for my mother-in-law with a PC Chips mobo and it's still sailing along just fine.

[mips]

Recommendations.

They have lots of AMD processors but it all means greek to me, also the Pentium 4D seem reasonably priced.

Get a AMD Athlon64 X2 AM2 CPU
Get a Gigabyte SoAM2/PCI-E M51GM-S2G Motherboard
Get 2x 512MB DDR-2 (or 4x 512MB DDR-2 / 2x 1024MB DDR-2) memory modules. They work better in pairs due to dual channel configuration (You will see the dimm slots are colour coded for pairs.) Speed determines price, so you decide.

Do not buy any of their hard drives. Go for seagate or western digital hard drives if you are going to buy a hard drive.

Motherboard options are these;
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ClassValue=Motherboard&ProductID=2281&ProductName=GA-M51GM-S2G
http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=1163&l1=3&l2=101&l3=0
http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_detail.php?UID=733
http://www.asrock.com/product/ALiveNF4G-DVI.htm

[Titus A Duxass]

Thanks, will probably go with your suggestions for CPu & M/B along with 2 x 512mb @ 533MHz. That puts me slightly over budget at 340odd Euro plus I have yet to find a really quiet cooler.

My major concern is the dual CPU set-up, you can see innumerable threads on the Forum about dual set-ups and the problems. Which release is going to give me the least amount of trouble?

[mips]

My major concern is the dual CPU set-up, you can see innumerable threads on the Forum about dual set-ups and the problems. Which release is going to give me the least amount of trouble?

What problems are you referring to ? I'm aware of people having 64bit application related issues that require stuff like chroot etc but that goes all the way back to debian.

Use the 32bit version of Ubuntu. If you have Dapper simply use the k7-smp kernel.

[Velotix]

My major concern is the dual CPU set-up, you can see innumerable threads on the Forum about dual set-ups and the problems. Which release is going to give me the least amount of trouble?

1) The release you use is irrelevant to the performance of a dual-core processor, seeing as all dual core processors are 64-bit anyway.

2) I've been using a Core 2 Duo for a while now and not had any of the problems described by other people. This was a brand new computer and so it had no old configuration files on it to mess it up. Perhaps the make of motherboard has some effect on this too, but I doubt it.

Anyway, though mid-range Core 2 Duo processors are £200 a pop, they'll last you years and years. They're exceptionally well-built and if they start getting slow, they overclock like a charm so you can solve that problem. I don't know how good a Pentium D is, but as far as I know it's just two Pentium 4s squeezed onto one die, so it won't perform as well as the Core 2 which was designed explicitly as a dual-core processor.

Of course, it sounds like getting a Core 2 would nuke your budget on its own, which is unfortunate. Bear it in mind though - Pentium processors are dead and buried.