Computer upgrade advice

Which do you think would net more real world speed for MS office, browser users that have multiple users and all of these aps running at the same time.

1. Moving froma 7200RPM HDD to a 10Krpm both using SATA 3.0

2. Moving from the single core Athlon64 to a Core 2 Quad.

The wording of your post is a little unclear, but for performance purposes, the first thing to do is to make sure you've got enough RAM that apps can stay cached in RAM. With RAM as inexpensive as it is nowdays, hey. Load up.

I've switched from single-core to dual-core (Athlon64 to Athlon64 X2, same system otherwise) and the primary area where it helped was system responsiveness during ongoing heavy CPU work (namely, video editing jobs). With single-core, it was lethargic. Dual-core cleared that right up, as well as chopping the transcoding times in half in Premiere Elements.

As for disk, I doubt you'd notice much real-world improvement for the scenario you seem to be describing, and that's coming from a 15000rpm SCSI addict :nana: So... lots of RAM, dual-core. And if you're using onboard video, adding an inexpensive add-in video card may help with GUI performance, too.

I would not go for AMD because you are basically buyinga 3 yr old CPU, C2D are pretty cheap now because of the soon to be relesaed core i7 in november so Q6600 can be had for like $180. I really think there is no need to go for AMD unless you are AMD supporter.

10k rpm may be overkill for ms office applications because you rarely use the disk once the program is running only when you save things or open documents. I would go for 7.2k rpm because is cheaper and because they run cooler another factor is the noise, those 10k rpm can become annoying. I have a 10k rpm drive and is great for loading games i'm always the first one to spawn and get the vehicles or boot windows in 1/3 of the time less but other than the average user will not benefit from it.

If you run tons of apps i just get more ram and run windows vista64 like 8Gbs. Although i doubt you'd use more than 3Gb's for office applications.

It may be a faster dual core would perform better than a slower quad core depending on how many apps are running. The drive won't help as much once things are loaded but if you are loading lots and lots of docs all day then it could add up. Make sure and check to see if ram is a problem get at least 2 gigs of ram and also if you have a really low end video card and you are loading graphic elements in your stuff that could slow things down some also.

Yeah nothing is graphics heavy at all, no games no vids.

I have 4gigs of RAM but only 3 show up due to the OS being Home XP.

I think I will get a quad core and possibly swithc to a 64bit OS and double the ram.

How old and what is the config of the current system?

FredM said:

Which do you think would net more real world speed for MS office, browser users that have multiple users and all of these aps running at the same time.

1. Moving froma 7200RPM HDD to a 10Krpm both using SATA 3.0

2. Moving from the single core Athlon64 to a Core 2 Quad.

Click to expand...

If you're talking about having multiple users logged on at the same time, using MSOffice and some kind of internet browser, I'd say that the hard-drive isn't necessarily the best fix. Are you talking about a cpu tower that performs calculations for multiple workstations, or are you just talking about a single pc that is used with fast-user-switching? If the first, get the quad-core, if the second, get a dual-core with a higher clock speed. In general, I'd recommend what the others are pointing to: get more ram, and get at least a dual-core processor. However, you're not going to be able to stick a Core2Quad in the same motherboard as an Athlon64 anyway - so if you buy a new mobo, go ahead and get one that offers clock speed and voltage control... gives you a few more options. :twothumbs

FredM said:

Yeah nothing is graphics heavy at all, no games no vids.

Click to expand...

Nevertheless, you may benefit very tangibly by adding an inexpensive video card instead of using onboard video. It depends on what you have. Some additional information about the system would help here.

+

FredM,..PM sent