939 to i7 System

[Tomson]

Just thought i'd post a quick log of my upgrade, might be useful for people justifying a new build

Old System:

amd x2 3800 939 socket @ 2.2GHZ
Asus A8V Deluxe
2gb Ram
3 IDE WD Drives
1 WD USB2 1TB drive
ATI x800 AGP
Mitsubushi 22" CRT
CoolerMaster Something
Tagan 450w
Win x32​

New System:

Intel i7 920 D0@ 3.2GHZ (mild oc to start) / Titan Fenir Cooler
Gigabyte x58a-UD3R
C-300 128GB @ 6GB/s
3 WD Green's 1.5TB * 2 & 1 * 2TB
1 WD Black 1TB (eSata for backup + Dual Boot)
6GB Patriot DDR3
Saphire Vapour-x 5770
2*Benq v2410 eco LED
Zalman HS-1
Coolermaster 700w Modular
Win7 x64​

I don't upgrade often.. as you can tell. I basically wanted, in order of importance:

Router Emulation (GNS3)
VMWare / Hyper-V
Games - Last PC game I properly played was Half Life 2 and a free trial of WOW, haha.
Encoding
Labs for cert exams -i.e. watch a video/read a PDF on one monitor, work on the other.
Quietness
1080p Blu-ray and 1080p Bluray Rips
Last 3-5 years.​

From..

To...

From..

To..

Real World

SSD - This is the first time I’ve used a computer and never had to really wait for anything. It’s so nice being able to open photoshop and it’s there 1-2 seconds later rather than before when it would be about 10 seconds if I was lucky. In fact nearly everything opens like notepad does on a regular comp. Installing things is also lightning fast.

Also. web browsing seems smoother, on big sites that have lots of images and flash I don't get any stuttering.

I think upgrading to an SSD is probably the best thing you can do now (from my experiance anyways), where as a new gpu or cpu comes into play now and then in certain situations an SSD pretty much comes in use all of the time.


Boot up times are ok, around 50 seconds, I think this is slow due to all the stuff the motherboard loads or the amount of drives I have attached as as soon as windows loads it's pretty quick, I seldom reboot so this isn't really an issue.


Game loading is nice also the sequential reads on the SSD definately help here (at least compared to what was there before)


Router emulation - Used to have issues with GNS3 when I would have a few routers but now (along with idle PC) can build much bigger networks.


VMware and Hyper-V - This is so much better now, can have more clients and servers running and they happily can have a decent amount of memory each. I think also running them off a faster hard drive helps a lot as well. Can use Hyper-V now as the CPU supports Hardware Virtualisation.


USB 2 to eSata/Sata - Using CD's/DVD's have had their day for me, I like to keep everything on storage. Before I would have a string of USB2 Drives but now either onboard or eSata. Playing movies etc it doesn't make any real difference it's only when moving things around going from 30MB/s to 80MB/s makes a nice difference. Plus, i've had some dodgy moments with USB encolsures screwing up drives and have to getbackmyfiles are few times, scary stuff. Windows Media Playe Library is now useable as the album art populating doesn't take much time at all and navigating around is smoother than it was with the old IDE Drive.


Encoding - I use Handbrake and recently have been backing up my DVD's to MKV using the Normal profile. On the old system I would get 20-25fps average.... on the i7 I get around 160-180fps average, Movies are literally encoded in under 20 minutes which is really nice, had I known it was going to be that much quicker I would have just waited for this machine and batch encoded everything in a couple days.


Gaming - I kinda compromised on a 5770. I basically thought that this card can play everything out now (read: crysis) at decent settings so why fork out more. I can play crysis at 1080p on high with 2xAA and get 36fps so i'm happy with that, smooth enough.


Memory - this was a little weird to get used to. On the old system windows only used around 1.5GB when I was just doing stuff like firefox, media player, pdfs, office but now it will use loads more, like sometimes up to 3GB. I'm told this is normal and it's just using memory to speed up the system - should the memory be needed it will 'release' it for use.


Movies - Nice having a 1080p monitor but i'm especially pleased with nearly all my MKV's have DXVA. So, when I watch a 1080p movie no CPU is utilised. Even when they're not DXVA they use under 15% of the cpu anyways.


Dual Monitors - So used to this already, how did I manage before? Though I still miss my old 22" CRT as the image quality with that CRT was superb, I wonder when LCD's will catch up?



Benchmark Comparisons:

Old System Drive - Some WD IDE: to New System Drive - C300 128GB @ 6GB/s:

Old Storage Drive on USB 2: to WD 2TB - Was going to use a 1TB black but this was a lot quicker :

 

[Kaos_Drem]

Looks like a pretty solid upgrade for you, but if you don't mind me asking. Why do you have 4 disc drives?

 

[Zink]

^ I agree with Kaos, you are way over the ODD limit. I guess with more drives you can rip four DVD's at once then leave for an hour and a half and they will all be done without having to manually change the disk.

 

[Tomson]

Looks like a pretty solid upgrade for you, but if you don't mind me asking. Why do you have 4 disc drives?

Because the PCI E sata controller hasn't yet showed up so I can't add the other 3 ODD to the computer.

I do bit of work for a some companies, DVD authoring etc for events, weddings etc. Often, unless it's in triple figures I can do the burning and lightscribing myself to save money. Having more disk drives is especially useful as lightscribe takes around 25 minutes per disk and writing to multiple cd/dvd's simultaneously saves time.

and yes, it's really useful for DVD ripping especially on this machine where the hard drive can now pretty much write the contents of all the DVD drives at max speed at once.