Well not so long ago i decided my trusty old PC could do with an update. I bought this PC around 4 years ago. Compaq Presario SR1609UK, and it cost me about £400 for just the tower. Back then it was pretty good, Sempron 3000+ processor, 1GIG DDR Ram ATI Radeon Xpress 200 chipset and the motherboard and I/O was the most appealing. It had 8 in 4 card reader on the front as well as 3 USB, Mic, Headphones, Line In Sockets and a 1349 Firewire port. The back was just as appealing, 4 USB, 1 Firewire and all the usually stuff. The motherboard itself had PCI-E x16 which was good, 4 PCI slots, and 4 RAM Sockets.

Now, if all that meant nothing to you, it basically meant that i could upgrade to future technologies easily, for example, if i wanted more ram, plenty of space, if i wanted better graphics, no problem.

Anyway, over the last 4 years it had some MAJOR upgrades, for starters 3GIG ram was slapped inside, a Sapphire Radeon x1650 Pro 256mb graphics card, and Avermedia Hybrid TV+FM HD TV Card and a Creative Sound Blaster LIVE! 24-bit sound card.. nice, was great for ages, even upgraded to vista, loved it.

Then the problem struck, applications were getting more complex and more demanding, games were getting super heavy on the processor, an there was the problem, the processor. The version of motherboard i had didn’t use the AM2 socket for processors, it meant that getting a upgraded processor would bring little improvement and then it was hard to find a processor to fit my socket.

So now we have arrived at 2 weeks ago, my pc became stupidly slow with the programs i need to use, i mean it was taking me just over 2 hours to convert and burn a DVD (take note of this). Now i looked high and low for weeks, trying to find a suitable upgrade, and then i found it.

AMD Phenom x4 9650 True-Quadcore
High end MSI Motherboard
4GIG DDR2 800 RAM

i saved my money, i ordered, paid, and waited patiently every morning for the delivery man to arrive.

When it finally arrived, i installed a 64-bit copy of vista, and the first thing i done was run the windows rating test. here’s the result.

This was a major improvement, especially considering my laptop which is only about 2 years old and cost £500 has a score of about 2.4. Now, as you can see from that score above, gaming graphics and the hard disk are letting me down, but this isn’t surprising considering I’m using the same graphics card i mentioned above which is now quite old, and I’m using a 4 year old IDE hard disk. Graphics I’m not to fussed about, new games still run on above normal settings fine, take The Last Remnant for example, this runs good with high textures and everything set on high providing shadows are off, shadows seems to cause a major drop in frame rate, but again, I’m not to fussed, i have an Xbox for playing games. So my next step really is to get a new SATA hard drive.

Now performance, OUTSTANDING is all i can really say, remember my old 2 hours+ DVD burning time, well i tested this a few days ago, the same DVD now only took me 18 minutes to convert and burn! My processor never seems to reach above 50% usage, in fact, the only time i ever got it to around 70% was when i was rendering an Adobe After Effects CS4 HD Project, and even then i think that was slowed down because my hard disk cant write data as fast as my processor can produce it.

So, if anyone is thinking about updating there PC’s Quad-Core is definitely the answer, absolutely awesome.

And with that, if anyone is interested, I’m selling my old motherboard, processor and 3GIG DDR Ram, runs great for normal day to day tasks, I’m a bit of a power user and most of the programs i use require high end CPU’s, anyway if your interested just let me know.

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