I've an early Core i3 computer, Win 10, it's OK for what we use it for but would be nice if it was quicker (Excel, DTP, GIMP, browsing/email etc).
It has 8 Gb RAM in it but i've noted it's 665Mhz. It will take 1333 so i'm wondering if there would be any real world notable benefit from an up grade to 1333 and going to 16 Gb while i'm at it?
Opinions, thanks.
Change hard drive to SSD will be the most notable speed increase.
Not knowing your circumstances I do not know how cost effective increasing the speed of the RAM would be
Changing from 8 to 16 there MAY be a marginal increase but I wouldn't have thought it noticeable
I just ordered 16GB or RAM an hour ago. I did not notice the speed issue. I don't know what the rules are about advertising but the chap at one of the main players (not a manufacturer) was extremely helpful and they had it in stock.
An increase in clock is unlikely to make a big difference unless you are doing lots of memory heavy things - databases etc - which you would likely know about. An increase in memory size is much more worth having.
Although I'm a bit puzzled about your memory speeds - there was DDR2-667 and DDR3-1333, but they aren't compatible. I think all the i3s are DDR3 or DDR4. While it is technically possible to make a DDR3-667 DIMM I've never seen one (although I have faked their memory timings).
Are you perhaps looking at the memory clock frequency, which is half the data rate? 'DDR' means 'double data rate', because it uses both rising and falling edges of the clock to transfer data - so a 667MHz clock gets 1333 million transfers per second, which is DDR3-1333.
Theo
Interesting, I ran Speccy and saw 665, You are correct, glad I didn't throw any money at it!
Thanks. I am looking at that. At the moment I have a small (256GB) SSD and a 1TB hard drive that is very old. I think a 1TB SSD would be a good investment.
What happens with the programs? Is it best to reinstall Windows on the new drive and to reinstall all the programs or to try to clone what I have?
I will find out next week when my new RAM arrives.
As a matter of interest, why do computers need RAM at all? Could the SSD not be used for short and long-term storage?
The prices have dropped a lot, so 1TB SSD is definitely affordable, but you probably won't find much of a speed increase, as long as your operating system and programs are on the SSD and you are only using the HDD for data storage - unless you are handling very large files that need to be paged in and out of memory.
I like a fresh install, as it cleans out any dross that is slowing things down. On the other hand, cloning will give you a fully configured system - and my own machine has not had a clean install for 3 or more years now.
SSDs are painfully slow compared to ram (1 to 2 orders of magnitude) and anyway, they would wear out rapidly with the constant changes.
The balance is that you could use RAM for all storage, but you'd have to ensure that it remained constantly powered and it is expensive, while SSDs are "slow", but can store huge quantities, cheaply. HDDs even more, even cheaper, but even slower.
RAM speed is not going to have a noticeable impact on a machine that probably have far more significant other factors slowing it down.
If it is still hard drive based, then going SSD will make a world of difference.
RAM quantity is a different matter. If you have "enough" then more will buy you little extra. If you don't have enough, then adding more so that you have enough, will can make a significant difference.
The last question is how much is "enough"? Enough is ideally the amount you need that allows you to do what you want without forcing the operating system to resort to using paged memory. i.e. having to dynamically swap out RAM contents to and from disk to create the illusion it has more memory that it actually has. Virtual memory will let you run more things at once, and work on bigger files without the OS simply saying "Sorry can't do that - out of memory", but it usually comes with a big performance hit.
If you are running 32 bit windows then "enough" is 4GB since the OS can't address more. For a modern 64bit platform doing "general business and internet stuff" then 8GB is a good minimum spec starting point. Of your listed apps, GIMP is the one likely to need more, and DTP if you frequently work on large publications.
(As always, there are caveats and exceptions to the above)
If the system works as it is, then cloning is the way to go usually.
Depends a bit on your starting point... you want to end up with the OS and applications on SSD. Having data on HDD will matter less, unless its something accessed often where access speed matters lots.
So if you have windows and apps already on SSD, and just data on spinning rust, then there is no real system impact on cloning the HDD to SSD and then keeping both SSDs in the same setup as current.
If you have apps on the HDD that are slow to load, then getting those installed on SSD would help. In many cases it might be easier to reinstall those on a new drive rather than trying to "move" installed apps.
SSD's are fast - compared to hard drives - but still *massively* slower than RAM. More to the point, they are not directly addressable by the processor, a CPU can't run code on a SSD - it has to load it into RAM that it can access directly first.
Also while DDR3 is still easy to get and fairly cheap, getting new DDR2 is far less easy, and much more expensive these days.
If you have a DDR2 system and need lots more RAM, buy a new(er) system!
The use case where SSD really scores is in reading random small records from huge files quickly (like in chess endgame databases). The seek time on an SSD is essentially zero whereas on spinning rust it is on average at least time to spin half a revolution and often more.
If you clone an OS that was configured for spinning rust you have to reconfigure it for an SSD or it will do things that are unhelpful. Defragging an SSD merely shortens its life to no good end.
Some cloning tools may help you to do this now but it is worth checking.
If you have very large amounts of memory in a machine you can use a chunk to pretend to be a very very fast but volatile hard drive. It used to be a thing back in the day when drives were *really* slow.
You can also double the speed of an SSD (and also double the risk of total data loss) by running a pair of matched drives in RAID 0 configuration. Absolutely no safety net but blisteringly fast if your SATA 3 can support two channels running flat out.
Snag is if either one fails your data is toast. It is a dangerous trick sometimes used to get the extra 2x speed boost.
I should think that's just the speed it happened to be running at when you looked, I don't they made any i3s slower than 1.2GHz and most (non-laptop parts) were over 2GHz ... check exactly what you have with CPU-Z
Sorry, realised you were talking about memory speed not CPU speed, CPU-Z will still tell you though.
It is probably best to do a clean install (clears out any accumulated junk [1]). Which would probably help speed up your system too.
Indeed some do a disc image and 'reinstall' that weekly, or so.
And some really paranoid types run a virtual machine so that every time the system is closed down all effects of the session vanish and when the VM is next implemented a clean image is used.
[1] This may be unmalicious but your computer does run it all the time so it can significantly slow down your machine. There is also the possibility of nasties on your disc that may not be obvious at the mo' but when a certain key event (Xth boot, a certain date, a visit to a certain website ) they launch and start running all sorts of malware.
I'm tinkering with another similar PC, a printer driver detected the system as 32 bit (correctly, i've checked). Bugger, i've spent an age updating it from Win 7, should have checked that first!!!
I'll check the other one too.
These may be three simplistic questions:
Yup there is no easy path from 7 to 10 while also going from 32 to 64 bit.
For that a fresh install of 10 will be needed (if it's already activated on that machine, it should re-activate without any problem - just skip entering a windows key at install time. If it needs one later, use the Win 7 one).
(if you don't know the win7 one, you may be able to recover it with Produkey which you can download from the nirsoft web site.)
So use 4 SSDs in RAID 10 then :-)
Cheers John!
When I cloned my OS HDD to SSD a few years ago I swapped them over and the OS on SSD ran straight away with no issues. Certainly didn't do any reconfiguring.
(As an aside, a few years ago I had a netbook (remember them?) with
2.5in HDD that was painfully slow to load. Cloned it to an SSD and it became a useable machine. Sold the HDD on eBay, and a year or so later sold the netbook.)HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.