What, to be a worthy upgrade to an XP 2800 Barton

  • Thread starter Thread starter Joe
  • Start date Start date
J

Joe

To begin with I am not a gamer. I use my computer to for various thing but
the most time consuming being audio and video. Examples Ripping Cds to MP3s,
editing home video, Photoshop on large files.

The last time I upgraded I went from an XP 1900 on a old K7S5A SIS MB to my
current XP 2800 on a NF2 Asus MB. I spent about $300 for this upgrade and I
saw a difference but not what I was expecting. While the new was better if I
would have had it to do over I would not have spent the $300 to get the
difference I saw. I would have paid maybe a $100 for the difference.

What would I have to upgrade my current system (listed below) to for it to
be a worthy and noticeable upgrade?

XP 2800 Barton
Asus NF2 MB
1 Gig Ram
2 WD Raptor HDs in Raid 0

Joe
 
Your best investment may be to get another hard drive for a scratch disk and
an additional gig of RAM rather than to push for a new cpu. Photoshop works
a lot better when it can build the work on a second disk.
Unless you spring for an Athlon 64 X 2 processor you will probably not
see an enormous difference in application speed. And for that money you
could buy a lot of RAM and additional hard drive.

Take a look at some of the comparison charts of cpu scores on Tom's
Hardware. It's only in the very high end cpu's for the applications such as
video encoding that there is a halving of rendering times. I'm not certain
that it's of the same comparative nature to still photography but my guess
is that it is.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/12/21/the_mother_of_all_cpu_charts_part_2/page19.html
 
Jan Alter said:
Your best investment may be to get another hard drive for a scratch disk
and an additional gig of RAM rather than to push for a new cpu. Photoshop
works a lot better when it can build the work on a second disk.
Unless you spring for an Athlon 64 X 2 processor you will probably not
see an enormous difference in application speed. And for that money you
could buy a lot of RAM and additional hard drive.
Click to expand...


<snip>
i agree.
i;ve used photoshop on 1, 2 & 3 ghz cpu's and have not noticed a terrible
difference...
however the more ram and the faster the HD's...the better the performance!

back in the old days it was a case of faster women and more liquor...
but today it's more RAM and faster harddrives <G>
 
It occurred to me this morning that you're best bet would to be to get one
of the Western Digital Raptor's; a 10,0000 rpm 74 gb hdd. I'd easily see a
huge difference in speed.
 
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