Upgrade PC

Hi

I am a graphic designer and lately my computer is giving some trouble when I am rendering in design software. Since my computer is 3 years old this is not a surprise. So I need to start upgrading but what first? I can't upgrade all at once. Some are saying that I should upgrade my CPU to a dual core and some say I should add more ram as well. Then others are saying that an upgrade of my NVidea GEForce6600 LE is the obvious thing to do...

So looking at the specs below (my current PC) what would you recommend I do?

• INTEL PRESCOTT PENTIUM 4 3.0GHZ 2MB PROCESSOR XD LGA775
• WESTERN DIGITAL 200GB SATA II 8MB CACHE HARD DRIVE - 2000JS
• SONY 16X DUAL INTERNAL DVD WRITER BLACK/BEIGE BEZEL DRU810A
• INTEL BLKD945GTPLKR 945G DUAL CORE LGA775 M/ATX MOTHERBOARD
• TRANSCEND 2 X 512MB DDR2 533 DIMM MEMORY TS64MLQ64V5J
• WINDOWS XP HOME EDITION - EMERALD OEM
• MSI NVIDIA 8981-435 NX6600LE 256MB PCI EXPRESS, TV-OUT, DVI

 

I'd begin by following the maintenance procedures http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=106650

How full is your hard drive?

 

Welcome aboard, I would agree with the memory upgrade as DDR2 is very cheap these days and is usually the most cost effective upgrade. 1GB of memory can these days, be considered a minimum especially for what you do.

Have you changed your normal use, say like are your renderings larger than they used to be? Have you changed software?

As to getting a dual core, I found that going from a single core to dual was like night and day when I was converting videos, which was CPU intensive.

The video card is low end but if it worked before then you really don't have to change it all things remaining the same since you bought this machine.

You have to find out why you're slowing down first and not just treat the symptom with more hardware if all things remain the same. Good luck.

 

My harddrive is about at 135GB so 50GB free.

 

I am rendering bigger files. More photographs of a way bigger file size. So this makes sense. So should I just upgrade to 2GB memory? Or should I upgrade CPU to dual core? I think that sounds about right to me.

 

50GB free is close to the limit, it'll begin slow you down even more if it drops much lower. Maybe a second hard drive would help (as well as the RAM upgrade already suggested - drives are also very good value right now), you could create your main Swapfile on there and store your data, freeing up more space on your System drive too.

 

OK, I know you're on a budget so to narrow that down a bit to see which of those two options you need or both. Start Taskmanager, ctrl-alt-delete and choose performance. Then render one of your large graphics and check the percentage of use of memory and CPU before and after and include the swap file size. At least we'll have an idea then.

Also post your budget so we don't recommend something way out of line. Many folks here are hardware nuts like me.