Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

"What Hardware Upgrade Will Best Speed Up My PC (If I Can Only Afford One)?"

What hardware upgrade is your best bang for the buck if you can only choose one? Of course there is no definitive answer as PCs vary in configuration and it also assumes you are able to make upgrades to begin with. Many people are moving from desktops to laptops at home so this question will depend on your equipment.

If you are running a laptop, your hardware upgrade options are typically limited to RAM or storage. If you have a desktop, your options are wider and range from video cards, processors, RAM and storage. So, the first step is to examine your system. If your PC has 512MB to 2GB of RAM, an upgrade to 4GB will be the cheapest way to get a performance boost. However, if your PC already has 4GB, another few extra gigs won't give you the same boost and therefore your money will be better spent elsewhere. If you have a laptop, your other option is converting from a HDD to a SSD. If you can swing the money on a good SSD, you will not only see performance gains but noticeable gains in run time as SSDs use much less energy.

If you have a desktop, you have a few additional options. If you game, you may want to take a look at your video card. If you run multiple intensive process at once, you may want to take a look at upgrading to a multi-core processor.

"The GIGABYTE HD 6870 Super Overclock is GIGABYTE's elite offering for those looking to pick up an overclocking friendly Radeon HD 6870. GIGABYTE has even started the process for you and boosted the GPU frequency by 50MHz and the memory frequency by 50MHz. This represents a decent boost these days when some companies are labeling video cards "Overclocked" with a mere 10MHz GPU increase and the memory being left a reference frequencies. Kudos to GIGABYTE for giving us higher core and memory frequencies."

If you're looking for a fast, overclocked video card, the latest and greatest from AMD is reviewed in extreme detail over on HardOCP. As much as I like having a powerful video card in my system, what I don't like is the noise that often comes with having that power. The good news is that this card is no louder than the reference design - but the review doesn't explain exactly how loud that is...

"Our feeling was that the usual extrapolations and estimates using minimum and maximum power readings don’t do justice to everyday operation. Therefore, we decided to measure the actual power consumption over a certain period of time and with different usage models, because most people do not just turn on their computers and play games without ever doing something else."

While consoles are designed for a 5-10 year lifecycle, PC gaming, especially graphics-wise, advances much faster than that. New video cards coming out every 6 months (granted, some are just rubbing off serial numbers and putting on a fresh coat of paint) and those at the top end can cost more than your first born. With greater power comes greater power consumption and Tom's Hardware does a check to see just how much of a difference it makes in a real world situation. Electricity prices being what they are, that expensive toy you just bought may end up costing you far more than you originally thought. Time to reconsider just how important gaming is to you.

"My Dell came with AMD HD 4200 integrated graphics — and an open PCI Express (PCIe) slot for a future upgrade to a discrete graphics card. Lately I’ve noticed that the computer seemed a bit sluggish when displaying high-definition video, and I wondered if adding a graphics card would improve its performance. I’m not a gamer, so I wasn’t looking for hot-shot gaming capabilities."

Computers are incredibly cheap, at least compared to what they used to cost over a decade ago, but that does not mean that people can afford to upgrade every year, or even every few years. I have computers that are well over 5 years old that are still in use, and I am willing to bet that a great deal of people out there are using computers even older. Old computers are trusty, longtime friends, but do not always perform great with what we demand of them today. Upgrades are a cheap way to keeping them perky, and adding a video card is one of the best investments you can make, especially now that hardware acceleration is becoming more commonplace. The only other major upgrade I could recommend is RAM. Computers sold four to five years ago tended to be anemic on RAM, often having 1GB or less. This was one of the reasons why Microsoft Vista performed like a dog. I have noticed that a lot of computers today are selling with 3-4GB of RAM, which probably helps considerably with performance. Even old Windows XP needs almost 1GB of RAM to be happy when a few programs are running. Without that space, your computer will spend more time swapping memory than actually doing something productive. Has anyone else found cheap, effective upgrades for their old bessie?

"Tom Petersen Director of Technical Mkt at NVIDIA describes how the performance of GeForce GTX 480 compares to existing solution. We highlight the different aspects of the benchmark and how the new GeForce excels in tessellation. Tom also offers a quick peak at how 3DVision Surround is pushing PC gaming forward."

Excited about the new NVIDIA GPUs coming out? This video gives you a bit of what's in store in terms of performance. I couldn't help but notice that the GTX 480 card had two power plugs connected to it. Yikes...I shudder to think how much juice that monster will draw!

"Matrox Graphics, the leading manufacturer of specialized graphics solutions, today announced the launch of the Matrox M9188 PCIe x16 Octal graphics card, capable of supporting eight DisplayPort or DVI Single-Link outputs from a single workstation. The Matrox M9188 PCIe x16 offers 2GB of memory, resolutions up to 2560x1600 per output, and advanced desktop management features—such as independent or stretched desktop modes—to drive energy, transportation, process control, financial trading, and other mission-critical environments with exceptional performance."

If two monitors are good, then eight must be fantastic. If you've got a stack of displays lying around, and an extra 2 grand, pop this bad boy in your computer and have at it!