Computer upgrade question: A little or a lot?

MattinSTL

MattinSTL

Sound Modulator
I'm having some trouble with my current system, and frankly it hasn't exactly been golden for the past few years anyway. I've bitched about the BSOD on a couple of occasions... and perhaps it wasn't window's fault?

Here's the deal... recently I encountered a nearly catastrophic problem on the PC... and the POST test tells me that I better replace my C: drive asafp. (further details in the ZA 7 thread)

So my question for you is... how much should I upgrade? I'm tempted to hit the reset button on moore's law, and replace the mobo and cpu with something more current, but I don't have the cash to redo the complete system and software.

Here's what I have:

p4 3g
2g ram
120 c drive (this drive has some mileage on it)
160 f drive
(lots of external drives of 500g each)
intel 875pbz board
6800gt board
audigy2 sound

What I really want is for my system to be as stable as possible, and as fast as I can afford for the time being. I would like to take the smartest upgrade path possible...

Cheap upgrade path adds 2g of ram and replaces the failing c: drive... this would probably do it!

Expensive upgrade path converts mobo and drives over to SATA and move to duo or quad core cpu... + full 4g of ram, etc. etc. I'm afraid if I go this route then I basically lose everything and I'm just building a whole new machine.

Thoughts?

Is my little "fix" a waste of money?
 
I'm looking at about $275 to update my PCs guts- AMD 64 dual core, board, and 2 gig of semi decent 800mhz ram. Shop at NewEgg, and you can usually get free 3 day shipping, and a deal on a bundle. Avoid ECS mobos, their support is sketchy. In your case, you can get 250gig HDDs for around another $100.
 
I just upgraded my p4/3.4G with 1G ram to a P4/2.4G Quadcore and 4G ram. It required a motherboard replacement but I used my original OS installation (did system restore point just in case). Both motherboards have Intel Chipsets so the driver change wasn't drastic. Once booted up on the new hardware, I downloaded and ran the latest Software INF Update utility from Intel's site and verified the hardware drivers. I had to call India to get a new registration key as windows detected too many hardware changes and forced reactivation. All in all a good upgrade that didn't hose my system.

Maybe I've been lucky but I've done several upgrades like this over the past few years and XP handles it well. I've only tried this with systems using the same chipset manufacturer. Intel to Intel. It sure isn't like it was in the win95/98 world. Hardware changes in those operating systems were a death sentence.
 
Do you think for video editing that there's a huge difference between SATA and ultra-ATA?

What I really want to do is replace my failing HD and get my over-due video projects done... by doing a fresh install of win xp and basically starting on a clean, new HD... which would mean replacing my current ata HD with a new, bigger one... and then later on I could do all the other upgrades... but if I do the big, complete upgrade now, then I'm worried about my 6800gt vid card (8x agp) and I pretty much have to replace EVERYTHING... because I can't even simply replace my ata with a SATA w/o doing the mobo now anyway.

Follow me? What would you do?
 
What's your upgrade budget? If you just want to fix what's broken then spend the 150-200 to replace that drive and up the ram. But if you want to spend about eight hundred you could recycle some of your parts and build something new and fast. I built a Shuttle PC for about 900 bucks a few months ago. It's a speed demon and I also passed on my Newegg parts list to Mark Harris who built a similar setup.
 
Immediate budget is LOW... but immediate need for a stable, vegas-based NLE is HIGH. The problem is most likely just the C: drive, but I'm going to fresh-install xp and try to get my system back to reliable performance.

What sucks is my vid card was actually quite good... like $400 a few years ago, but unfortunately I just missed the pci-express switch... so both my mobo, and my vid card, are for 8x AGP.

Where the problem comes in... is if I want to do the "big" upgrade... then I pretty much have to do it all at once... correct? My AGP vid card is now trash? And if I'm going SATA on the hard drives I need new mobo, yes? Could I add a SATA card to my older mobo and clear that as a future path? Is that a bad idea?

As I said... currently my issue is a "broke" PC... but I don't want to WASTE money by fixing parts that could have been huge upgrades. That's why I asked if SATA is a big performance advantage over ultra-ATA on hard drives.

I could just replace the hard drive for now... and upgrade the RAM... or even ONLY replace the hard drive... but I'm wondering if that's just tossing that $120 off the later upgrade if I should be going SATA?

Basically I'm at a crossroads... and I have a few video projects that are more or less urgently needed to complete. So my gut says to just get the computer fixed and back to editing as fast as possible... which means just the hard drive and maybe the cheap 'n easy RAM upgrade... but I'm wondering if a stable dual-core or quad core machine would absolutely SMOKE my "fixed" machine... and by "smoke it" I mean smoke it... not some benchmark graph crap that fooled me last time. My previous machine wasn't much worse then what I have now (current problems notwithstanding)... and I chased the last 10% of performance back then... for what turned out to be not much PRACTICAL gain over the machine that was upgraded.

I use this machine primarily for relatively simple projects edited in Vegas and rendered out to DVD... but some of the projects are 1.5 hours long edited... and it really takes a long time to get these rendered out... this is why I'm wondering if the big upgrade is due... or if it really makes that much difference. In another thread a guy bragged about how great his new machine was, but he didn't put some numbers I could grasp onto that... I want to read of some personal benchmarks... would my rendering times be cut in HALF? Or even better? What happens to Vegas' ability to real-time preview what I'm doing on the timeline?

Maybe you should PM me that list Isaac... if you don't mind! Between you and Mark... that's good company.

I've already got a Lian-Li case with I think a 500w PS... so maybe I could get going and re-use some of what I already have.

EDIT: I think I'm leaning heavily towards "big" upgrade.
 
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I would say just buy what you need and finish your current projects. Hold off on building something new because it will eat up a week or two of your time installing, tweaking, and making sure everything is stable.
 
MattinSTL said:
Here's what I have:

p4 3g
2g ram
120 c drive (this drive has some mileage on it)
160 f drive
(lots of external drives of 500g each)
intel 875pbz board
6800gt board
audigy2 sound
Click to expand...

Going to 4g ram would help a bit, to finish your projects. If you have money left over, you can get 7200rpm hard drives. Buy.com has 1 terabyte drives 7200 rpm drives for $280. Your bus on the P4 won't see any real improvement or sata vs. Ultra sata. Don't waste $ upgrading your system anymore.

If you can upgrade, go with a dual core, no PC software really utilizes the quad cores to justify the cost. Your hard drives you use to upgrade your system can be moved to your new system. Memory, maybe, depends on how fast a memory your P4 can handle.

The P4 has very slow memory/bus access compared to dual cores. So your memory, hard disks and graphics and processing will be slower. You eventually will see a 30-50% speed improvement ripping projects with the newer dual core machines.

Hope this helps.
 
Isaac_Brody said:
I would say just buy what you need and finish your current projects. Hold off on building something new because it will eat up a week or two of your time installing, tweaking, and making sure everything is stable.
Click to expand...

Do you also agree with Spunknoid's assessment? Is the difference in ATA vs. SATA a big one or a small one? Meaning... is it worthwhile to go ahead and replace the current ATA drive with a good ATA drive, intending to carry that over to the new machine (later on)... or should I just replace the current drive with something temporary, planning to toss it out when new machine time comes anyway?

Part of my "fix" to the current computer problem is going to include a totally clean reinstall of EVERYTHING anyway... so I'm basically boned as it is. The killer in this situation is that I have people WAITING for videos that they will pay for upon completion... plus we're about to attempt a weekly tv show here in STL... and while most of the show will be edited by the channel airing the show... I'll be responsible for most of what makes the show fun... oh, and that's supposed to start on the 26th of this month... so no pressure.

Isaac... I'd still like to see your recommended components list... if you built that for $900 6 months ago then the parts should be already showing some savings... but KNOWING that a collection of parts works is good enough for me. In the past I always tried to build for stability first and speed second... which is why I used an intel board (but that didn't guarantee anything in the end anyway)... again, the other thing I'm wondering... is if my AGP card is now basically junk? I think a 6800gt card with lots of video ram on it is still pricey, so I'd like to re-use that if possible.

Hmm... well... either way, the big fix starts tomorrow.
 
The new Sata drives require that your motherboard hard disk controller be compatible. I doubt the P4 motherboard is.

If you go with the fastest drive you can 7200-10000RPM, you will see an improvement on that alone.

The other suggestions were great ones. For minimal cost, I think memory will be about $75 and Hard drive may run $200-400 if you get a 7200 to 10000 rpm drive. These drives will work in a new system if you build your own.
 
stick with it until NEHALEM architecture from Intel comes out late this year, it's a whole new system and worthy of upgrading to. Until then pick up a $100 HDD to replace the C:\, and if the mobo HDD controller is bad pick up a PCI sata controller. I wouldn't want to upgrade with such a major leap forward coming up later this year: Intel's Nehalem, successor to the core architecture + Nvidia's new GPU platform in the 2nd half of the year (codenamed as GT200 or d10e)
 
Thanks Spunk and Film...

Spunk... I've been on 7200rpm drives for probably 8 years. That isn't really a big demand in a drive. I've also had 16mb buffer for about as long... + 8.9 seek time... I've always been OCD on this stuff.

Film... thanks for that "revelation"... really all I need is for what's BEEN working to get BACK to working! I'm not doing majorly intensive stuff... but I need my machine to do what it needs to do NOW (not "now" as in "instantly" but rather "now" as in TODAY)... so I'll go with the new drive, add some RAM, and wait it out on a complete new machine later this year. If things keep moving as they have been it shouldn't be a problem to get something tricked out later on.

Thanks for the input guys... I'll start the BS tomorrow. "Big" upgrade later I guess.
 
Matt

Not sure if you caught it but one of the things filmguy123 mentioned was a pci sata card. Not sure if the system will boot off that card, but since you are planning on getting a new hd, you could get a card (about 15-20 off ebay) and go ahead and get a sata drive. If you had to you could then convert one of the other drives (I would use ghost to image but not sure if you have that) to your boot drive and then use the sata in the system as another drive.

Just my 2cents.


upon further thought, once your system has installed the sata you should be able to choose it as your boot drive in bios even if it is connected to a pci card.
 
Not many boards now will support the AGP card, so if you are going to upgrade you'd be best to do it all at once. Prices are low now on a lot of gear, so you can get some good prices.

Also, if you need to run the old PATA drives in a new machine you could always get a cheap old PCI PATA controller card for like $20. Should hold up to 4 drives like your current board most likely does. Push come to shove, they also make PATA to SATA converters that will allow you to plug the old drive into the new ports. I used on a long time ago when they were first making the conversion and had no problems with it (although it will only run as fast as the PATA drive will allow). I want to say they were about $10 a piece.

Also, remember that XP will really only run 2G of ram w/out getting funky memory timings and making your mobo think too hard. More is not always better.

Just for kicks, I went shopping on Newegg for you.

$118 - MSI P6N SLI Platinum LGA 775 NVIDIA 650i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
$86 - MSI NX8600GTS 8600GTS 256MB GDDR3 PCI-E x16 SLI Video Card This one has a $40 rebate
$70 - WD Caviar 320GB 7200 16MB SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
$45 - G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800
=$319

This board should support your current chip @ 800mhz until you are ready for a new one. In a year go get you a C2D and crank that board up.
 
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Thanks for this Dan... now I wish Isaac would throw his .02 in on this front... but your post is a big help... this is the line of thinking I like. That's a very good approach to my problem. From my experience with Vista... I'm not embracing it. I would like to hold onto xp-pro for as long as I can, but then again... maybe that's stupid? Feel free to say so.

I can't upgrade everything all at once (meaning software, etc.) but you have laid out a really logical path. I'll probably keep running Vegas 6 and DVD Architect (whatever came with Vegas 6) for now... that was educational software so I can't upgrade it... it's got to be replaced.

It blows my mind that the $400 vid card from a few years ago is basically worthless now... I will never do that again. (I have way more drastic examples of moore's law, but still... it never ceases to amaze me... Doom3 and FarCry bought that card, although my machine never ran stable with those games.)

So I've got newegg open in another window... and I'm off to the races. Thanks.

EDIT: My processor is socket 478... not socket T... I think that's a problem and I'm back to full UG.
 
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Well that stinks! I was hopping you would have a 775 chipset P4, same as the C2D's.

If you look on Newegg they only have 4 mobo's that still support 478, while over 300 that support 775. That stinks man!

There are some cheaper 775 chips, but if you have to buy a new chip too I would just go ahead and get a decent one. I'm sure we are getting further away from what you wanted to spend now.

If I was going to get a chip right now it would be this on.
 
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PM me your email and I will send my parts list from new egg. it's the one Isaac sent me. maybe you can knock down some of the specs and get it cheaper. but still it was only like $850 as it was.
 
PM sent. Your avatar is conveniently poised to shoot this P.O.S. out from under my left arm...

For the record... I'm going to "fix" my current system... and ALSO start planning/buying for it's replacement. There have been too many times that I've had nothing to do while my machine is working as a lone render-farmer... so maybe I'll give him a buddy that can get some sh*t done.

Thanks Mark.
 
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