Upgrade RAM or SSD? and which SSD?
 

OK, my PC is slowing down. Windoze bloat updates appear to being taking its toll ( or purposely making it obselete). Its not as snappy as it was and I want to bring back some speed. I'm willing to throw £100ish at it to get some performance back.

Current quick spec is: Q9550 running a RAID 0 on pair of Samsung Spinpoints and 4gig of ddr2 800 ram clocking at 4-4-4-12 and a ATi HD4870. Motherboard is Gigabyte GA-EP45UDP3 (p45 chipset), and Vista x64 (Before anyone starts - I'll probably get win8 next year :p ).

Fair to say its a decent but aging spec, and its likely slowing down from excess bloatware. So a OS reinstall maybe called for. Typically 2gig of my RAM is used as cache, but I'm still seing 2.8gig being used on my 6gig page file. I'm wondering if its this 2.8gig on the page file that is slowing things down (especially shortly after boot) and response not being as snappy as it once was.

If so, would doubling up on RAM solve this and speed things up? As it shouldn't be needing the page file so much.

Or...am I better off dumping the RAID 0 and sticking in a SSD. Currently it benchmarks at around 140MB/sec read/write so an SSD should be miles faster. I'm inching towards the latter, but with various people having problems with SSDs reliability and their long term deterioration of performance I'm wary.

These are the two SSDs I'm looking at

http://www.ebuyer.com/268693-corsair...ssd-f120gb3-bk

or

http://www.ebuyer.com/268244-ocz-120...t3-25sat3-120g

Looking round the net both have mixed reviews; The Corsair had a big recall on early models, and I'm seeing grumblings on the OCZ regarding performance/comptability.

I'm also uncertain if it'll work ok on my board and OS. This trim and garbage collection stuff has me all confused. I note that its SATAIII, and whilst its backwards compatable, my SATAII board will obviously limit it to 300MB/sec. BUT would using RADI0 on two SSDs allow me to exceed this limit? or is the 300MB/sec limit on the P45 chip rather than each SATA port/channel.

I think its the former, so if i'm right could I get 600MB/Sec from two cheaper RAID 0 SSDs, or is my chipset not going to like RAIDing two SSDs? Plus would I still be able to do the house keeping trim/garbage stuff. I don't think it does, so maybe this is a bad idea and I'm better off sticking to a single SSD until I decide to upgrade the mobo/cpu/ram/everything else ;).

Sorry, I know its alot of question, but I've only just started looking at SSDs now their prices/capacity are more sensible. I'm open to suggestions and reccomendations that stay within that £130 max budget.

Cheers in advance

Doh! :facepalm: Just realised I can get a Sata 3 controller card for £15...good idea or not?

I went down the SSD route on my Dell laptop, It already has 4gb ram, decent graphics etc. The ssd drive (Crucial M4) absolutely flies, I wouldnt even bother with a raid array until you have seen how fast a single drive runs.

I have run benchmarks etc and even with a sata2 controller (The M4 is Sata3 compatible) it brings up some brilliant speeds.

For a less detailed example, my old Hitachi drive was getting a windows experience fugure of around 5.2 and was the slowest part of the machine..

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v1...endy/speed.jpg

Hi Ali

personally i would go for more memory(not sure how much your board allow,if allow 8GB i would go for 8GB,if allow 16GB i would go with 12-16GB),personally i've now G-Skill,i've before too Corsair XMS-2(great RAM),OCZ Gold and these has been OK for my needs at this time.

I've tried mine older PC with i3-540 and 4GB memory,500GB WD Black in few programs(Adobe PS,Reason 5,Cubase 5 and Ableton Live 8)and must say with 4GB i was run off the memory with one program opened Ableton Live(yes i've run 20 plugins/instruments plus 16 audio tracks),later i've tried this with 8GB RAM and must say again same program with same plugins,samples etc,and i've still free around 3GB and CPU has been just touching 30%,on previous CPU touch almost 60%

This is mine experience with size of RAM.


Now about the SSD,not sure but if you are upgrading to SSD,maximum speed of some SSD is still under 300mbs and i don't see massive improvement over SATA 2,maybe i'm wrong,if Sata 3 card i would go rather with new MB and new CPU at future,and these cheap controllers,i don't know i don't trust them

Jura

First things first you should get more RAM.

Secondly, Vista is so memory intensive I'd change that too.

I think you should look at these SSD's too;

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/128gb...-s-new-version

A bit more expensive but the reviews warrant it.

Cheers;

Vista's services been tweeked and tweek and tweeked. It was fast (full boot and fully usable within 30seconds) at that point it was booting/running faster than the win 7 systems I used at the time, but the lastest batches of updates over the past three months have killed it. I'm holding out for the next OS release as seems pointless buying win7 when the next one is out soon (and usually late win 7 buyers get a free upgrade, which at this point isn't offerred).

So, 4 gig isn't enough now? I mean I'm using 2gb of it with half being used purely for cache, not applications. Thats an arse as I don't really want to buy more ddr2 RAM as its something that can't be carried over to a new system.

(actually, noted something weird going on - I think I have a fragmented pagefile, but can't even find it. It usually shows up in defraggler :wonder: )

Oh yes, current experience index is 5.9 on standard clock speed (it will overclock, but the fans get a bit too noisy for my liking - its a near silent PC ):

Not all bad I guess, just doesn't feel like it used to when using it.

The mobo can take 16gb, but with being DDR2, its going to cost ; surely its better off putting that aside for new mobo and CPU that'll take DDr3?

ram is good for the application you are running as well as swapping to other running apps.

milling about the desktop and explorer is when the SSD will be a boon.

I have 24GB ram in my machine and it's 'slow' because i have a normal hard drive.

you seem to have enough ram - get an SSD!

By the sounds of it you just want to get a new computer.

I'd probably save the money then fork out for that, if that is the way you are going.

Between another 4gb and an SSD drive, SSD drive every time, the reaction speeds of the pc are transformed.

BTW your DDR2 800 ram will be defunct the second you think about upgrading your pc, the SSD drive will happily go into your next rig.

http://i1139.photobucket.com/albums/...61/Capture.jpg

SSD i have just gone from a 60 to a 120 Corsair Force 3

!29 quid at Ebuyer, i was going to go OCZ but a few issues around with the drives so i went this route and cheaper, nearly as fast. Its a sata 3 drive but im only sata 2 and its maxed me out PC is very fast in all.

Al - have you got a USB memory stick lying around? Dedicate it to Readyboost - makes a heck of a difference.

Why get an SSD when W7 is as big an improvement in speed ?

I have a Crucial M4 in my big PC = 7.8 out of 7.9 :luxhello:

dunx

I think I've decided that a SSD has to be the way forward then. I'll get a clean slate OS install too which'll address whatever issue is slowing this thing down. I'm not quite ready to dump this lot for an i7 rig yet. So now its a just a case of which one. :wonder:

Does that really work? I thought it was a gimmick LOL. I'll have a rummage as I have some somewhere that are empty, although most are dubious speeds.

Quite simple; W8 is due out soon. Going W7 now would be a waste of money. Anyhoo, I only encountered speed issues over the past 3 months. V x64 was fine so long as you know which necessary services to disable, but obviously something else is causing me problems, I don't know what it is apart from its something to do with one of the big updates it did.

I can see why. I ask a honest question and you didn't answer it, instead trying to derail the thread (troll). No further comments on this please Jack, you have your answer now, so move on.

Big thumbs up to everyone else with their helpful comments :thumb: Long term new PC, new OS later next year. But I think an SSD and clean OS reinstall in the meantime might do the trick. PLus the SSD can be transferred over to a new PC if need be. :cool:

Have you thought about Beta testing Win 8?

May be a pretty good short term solution.

If you get a M4 make sure you flash the firmware to the 0009 version