Advice on upgrades, Please!?

  • Thread starter Thread starter acdcnews
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acdcnews

Hi, everybody:

I do 2-D design work on an XP box and am considering some upgrades to help
with video refresh rates and to stop the occassional "bogging down" that my
system is starting to have ( 3 yr old machine: P4 1.7 GHz, 512 MB SDRAM,
nVIDIA 64 Mb).

My files are sometimes in excess of 100 MB, and many times are
high-resolution, multi-layered Photoshop CS files (this is where the bogging
down is starting to show). Things have slowed down many times in Corel Draw
12 as well, especially on particularly complex vector/line-based
illustrations.

Should I worry about upgrading my video card, or should I concentrate my
funds for more RAM, or do I need both in order to improve performance in
design tasks?

Thanks much!

Ava
www.acdcgraphics.com
 
acdcnews said:
Hi, everybody:

I do 2-D design work on an XP box and am considering some upgrades to help
with video refresh rates and to stop the occassional "bogging down" that my
system is starting to have ( 3 yr old machine: P4 1.7 GHz, 512 MB SDRAM,
nVIDIA 64 Mb).
Click to expand...

I'd recommend a Radeon 9600PRO and another 512MB Sdram or 256MB if
you're low on funds.
But since you didn't tell how much you're willing to spend this is all I
can tell you.
 
Glitch:
I'd recommend a Radeon 9600PRO and another 512MB Sdram or 256MB if
you're low on funds.
But since you didn't tell how much you're willing to spend this is
all I can tell you.
Click to expand...

Upgrading the video card is wasted money unless he has onboard video. He
needs RAM, as much as he can afford and/or the board will take; then he
needs to upgrade the CPU.
 
Hi, everybody:

I do 2-D design work on an XP box and am considering some upgrades to help
with video refresh rates and to stop the occassional "bogging down" that my
system is starting to have ( 3 yr old machine: P4 1.7 GHz, 512 MB SDRAM,
nVIDIA 64 Mb).

My files are sometimes in excess of 100 MB, and many times are
high-resolution, multi-layered Photoshop CS files (this is where the bogging
down is starting to show). Things have slowed down many times in Corel Draw
12 as well, especially on particularly complex vector/line-based
illustrations.

Should I worry about upgrading my video card, or should I concentrate my
funds for more RAM, or do I need both in order to improve performance in
design tasks?

Thanks much!

Ava
www.acdcgraphics.com
Click to expand...

The video card is not going to make much if any difference.
Your use will benefit from faster CPU, faster memory
(PC100/133 just isn't all that fast relatively speaking),
and possibly more memory. Check XP's Task Manager for the
"Commit Charge", "Peak" memory utilization and you'll have a
better idea of how much memory you're using.

For your uses, you really do need the CPU, faster memory (so
of course motherboard change too). Adding more slow memory
will be a complete waste of $ _IF_ Task Manager doesn't show
you're already exceeding 512MB as a peak.
 
Thanks everybody who posted, I really appreciate it. Perhaps I'll wait a
little bit and go for a newer machine altogether since it sounds like it's
the speed of my machine that is causing the bogs mainly.

Have a great weekend!

Ava :-)
 
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