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My PC is starting to feel little sluggish and is getting on a bit, which I think is predominantly down to my large memory requirements, slow HDD and with the amount of stuff I have open throughout the day.

Current spec:

Core2Duo E8400 @ 3Ghz (not overclocking, had no end of issues getting this mobo running it stable as is)
8Gb DDR2 @ whatever (1066?)
XFX Radeon HD6870 1Gb Black Ed.

The graphics card I have no wish to upgrade as games are fine, I just want the system in general to feel very responsive and fast to load and do things in Photoshop. With this in mind, what would be the optimal cost effective upgrade in terms of mobo, CPU, memory and an SSD for the OS and apps to give me that boost?

Just to add I'm not fussed about loads of peripheral ports, etc on the mobo. I have no need for USB3/eSATA and stuff like that.

£100ish  worth of SSD and a windows re-install and you should be flying. I cant see any reason why that spec wouldnt be nice and responsive.

It's DDR2 so is relatively slow and it's only 8Gb. It's snappy and fast on startup but really struggles when you have Photoshop, Illustrator, three browsers and various other bits running over the course of a day. I'm not the rebooting type either, I generally leave work and things open in the background which isn't a habit I'm keen to change tbh.

If I could fit more memory that would appease me, but the board won't take more and it seems I need to go to DDR3 to increase my memory capacity, hence needing a core bundle upgrade.

I'm on a core 2 duo 2Ghz laptop and only 3GB of ram, and often have lots of stuff open and I wouldn't call it slow at all, I do sometimes feel that my RAM does limit me, but my laptop can only go to 6GB and it's a bit picky about which ones you can use, but dont really have many problems of being unresponsive.

I'm on an SSD and that certainly helps...

Have you had a look at your running services and background services and also is your anti virus slowing things down lots? You can put some programs in the exceptions which may help?

SSD is my main suggestion, and keep stuff off of your desktop or other frequently used places as your virus scan might be scanning that. Have you disabled your pagefile as well, give it a go as it will limit your HD access, which is likely to be your bottleneck..

I use a Ramdisk instead of a pagefile (unless that gets full obviously) and I don't run an antivirus (only scheduled runs Monday 5am). I mean I have serious amounts of stuff open, an SSD would help but I don't really want to be shuffling around a pagefiles on it constantly and I'd rather fix the core problem which is 8Gb of ram isn't enough.

From what I can tell I need to spend about £250 minimum for it to be worth it, ideally I'd get an i5 2500K, cheapie motherboard and a chepaish 16Gb ram set

How much of your 8Gb are you using with the RAM disk, have you tried disabling that entirely, which will givev you more RAM?

And I'm sure it's a silly question but you are running in 64bit mode?

Also if you do go down the SSD route, you don't want to be running a page file, as it can slow things down doing so!

You guys can't really think 16Gb is excessive? I think 6Gb is a bare minimum these days tbh. I tried to balance the speed of the Ramdisk for temp stuff and photoshop scratch disk (which is only 2Gb) with actual virtual memory space, so I have 6gb free. I really do just need another 8Gb or so of memory. I'm got Photoshop with 5 small files open, Firefox, Chrome, MSN, Windows Live Mail and uTorrent running and I'm using 64% of my memory already, it doesn't take much to eat it really.

How do you not run 64-bit mode?

If you're sitting at 64% and your computer is slow, then memory isn't your issue :|

Find the bottleneck! if it's linux I'd recommend viewing vmstat and iostat to check for blocking calls to the filesystem or tracking mem usage over time.

Resource monitor in win7 is a pretty good tool that may be able to help.

It's sitting at 64% and not slow right now because I'm not pushing it - don't forget to factor in the 2Gb ramdisk. In fact... see below... What I'm saying is over the course of a days work it is like a stabbed rat fast as hell to begin with until it runs out of steam because I run out of memory. It is a visible, tangible and empirically observable result.

Do you all sit with one browser tab open and a game of Solitaire minimised? This isn't the Windows 95 days, I do appreciate you're all trying to help but come on guys give me some credit. Can't I please just have some hardware recommendations instead of being told the n00bie stuff?




If anyone genuinely thinks that is an unusual amount of stuff to have open then I think you must do very little on your PCs all day.

4GB DDR2 Ram - 3Ghz E5600...

Currently sitting at 92 Processes :\ 48% ram remaining not slow in the slightest.

I'd say that you have other issues rather than a lack of ram, but if you want to throw money at it, just buy some :|

A full upgrade is called for IMO the tech of your current rig is 4 years old not only is this your personal PC it is also your work machine and should be considered accordingly, it would be fair to say you need so many browsers open for testing purposes? ...so you need a fairly current system with a decent amount of Ram - don't forget this is a business expense so claim the VAT back and whatever upgrade is 20% cheaper straight away and so a bargain!

I would recommend a i5 2500k, 16gig of 1600 DDR3, 120gig SSD, 120 quid Z68 board, decent cooler and you should be sorted for a few years

Personally I think I misunderstood what you were asking, I thought you were looking for a cheap upgrade with max performance, not a full set of system components, in which case I'm out as I haven't built a system in years

However the Vertex 3 120gb SSD is very good! >500MB/s read/write and the initial issues they had have now gone.. Get the 120Gb version as the 60GB is slower (£104.99 inc. VAT @ Aria)

M3ta7h3ad, well I don't really see how and tbh I'm not going to get into a peeing contest over running processes and optimised OSes (although I would be interested to see a print screen of your task manager to compare), I'd rather just throw a bit of money at it and have a productive workhorse than squeeze every last kb out of the available RAM

Sorry XEntity I possibly wasn't clear from the first post, what I'm after is a cheap upgrade, but it needs to be core bundle at the minimum, mobo+cpu+ram purely to get more memory and a bit more CPU grunt - the SSD would be a big boost but I can factor that in after working out the cost of the main components.

Thank you Shaun, any recommendations on the Z68 board, I've been struggling to find reviews and the best recommended budget board seems to be the Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3-ISSD. Cooler wise I'm thinking Noctua? Is there anything looming on the horizon I should wait for, either in terms of better tech or tech that will push other prices down?

nige, I thought you already had an SSD ?

anyway.... go with that Shaun said... it's pretty much what I've got here and I've never had any slow down ever... I don't run as much as you... but I don't restart for weeks at a time :-)


there's nothing new coming that I know about...

I've got that 64Gb Crucial SSD, but it's full of games. I'm not too fussed about an SSD initially as load times aren't a big problem as much as shuffling stuff around in swap files, I'd rather pick one up later as prices and tech on those is getting keener all the time.