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[e90]

Current setup
AMD X2 5200 (2.6 GHz)
2GB ram - DDR2
IDE disk
Radeon 4600 HD (512mb)

Upgrade budge ~£100

Option a)
Disk -> 64GB Kingston SSD
and
Ran -> 4GB

Option b)
CPU -> AMD 'whatever fits in PC'  (roughly 3.6Ghz)

Current problems: PC is slow, the other day it took ~3 minutes to reload firefox whilst the disk was going crazy.  I know the disk is slow, and that it's full of crap, AND I intend to reformat soon... but thought I might give the PC a boost.

Problem with option a) is that I feel like I'm, upgrading the same thing twice... access speed.

The problem with Option b) is that the cpu alone feels like it will accomplish nothing

I'm not overly keen on just upgrading the GPU as this thing was meant to be silent, which it almost is... I can leave it on over night and barely hear it, which can't be said for many builds.

I think option a)... but any thoughts or experience welcomed

x

[Power]

Option a will probably help more with everyday use. I'd say your RAM and HDD are a bit more of a bottleneck currently.

[DeadlyAvenger]

Yeah - a 2.6Ghz dual core is pretty good - you could perhaps try to overclock it, I don't know what that processor is like but you could get a better cooler for £20 and get a decent speed boost.

SSD will definitely give you a noticeable speed boost in loading games and just general responsiveness of your PC - but won't make much difference when you're actually in game.

Bumping the RAM up to 4Gb will probably give you a noticeable increase too as you'll be using the page file less (which is in turn using your HDD).

I don't know what the Kingston drives are like - I think Junta had one / was selling one not so long ago?

[Omnipotens]

Depending on your motherboard and your RAM speed, you may be able to get that CPU up to around 3.1GHz, decent cooler is a must.

With the budget you've got and your issues, you may be able to get a decent cooler for the OC, a smaller SSD to put your OS to as well as another stick of RAM.

A bit from both options?

[Guilt]

TBH you might I think that you might be better saving a bit more and doing a bigger upgrade, I don't think you'll get the value out your £100 pound performance wise. £200 will get you a new MB, Ram, a faster CPU and most importantly a future upgrade path. You might get a few quid for your bits on ebay too.

[Zarf]

SSD wise, you can't really go wrong with a Crucial M4 - great reliability, solid (lol) three year warranty, not too expensive, and very quick (recent firmware update boosts speeds).

[Brahms]

Just can't bring myself to believe that an SSD is a good investment at the moment, but I think I'm becoming more and more of an outlier. Just to make an outlier style suggestion: If performance in your dekstop OS is the issue, you could change the OS.

Otherwise, I'd do as Guilt says. Reformat the computer, stash the cash and wait till you can afford a full upgrade. If not, upgrade the SSD, at least that's a part of the build you can take with you to your next rig, and probably the one after that too.

[DeadlyAvenger]

An SSD is without a doubt the best investment I have made in my PC for probably about 2/3 years - everything else has pretty much only been an incremental/marginal upgrade (Ati 4850 -> 5850, Q9550 to i7 920, 4Gb -> 6Gb RAM, Aircooling -> Watercooling) whereas getting an SSD feels like an upgrade of orders of magnitude.

It takes my work laptop 10 minutes to boot up in the morning at work and that's an i5, 4Gb RAM, 7200 rpm hdd: so pretty reasonable in terms of spec. My home PC takes about a minute with an SSD.

At work, I have to wait for programs like Word, LabVIEW, Outlook, Browsers to open etc. - at home it's virtually instantaneous.

Personally, I think you have anything more than a reasonable dual/quad core (>2.4Ghz), 4Gb RAM, a graphics card that's ~£100-£150 then an SSD is going to give you the best performance boost you can get, even at the current price levels.

[Brahms]

The speed gains for SSD's are definitely there, but I think that the time gained is sort of worthless. Turning the PC on gets done whilst I make breakfast in the morning or whilst I get changed in the evening. Chrome and spotify auto start and they're the only things I use most days. Can't load all my games on an SSD without the ballache of moving them around, so what's the advantage in saving 30 seconds per load if you spend 20 minutes every two months doing housekeeping. On top of that if it's a multi game you only get the load advantage if you join half way through a match because otherwise most games just have you waiting for other players. Until they start making games that use the increased read speed to stream longer levels in I don't think the increase is meaningful.

They definitely do make things on the desktop seem much more responsive though. I just think the time saved is sort of worthless. I'd rather spend £5 on juggling balls and learn to juggle whilst things load.

[Zarf]

You are a far more patient man than I Brahms!

SSD Speed is addictive, It's like getting a bigger monitor - once you've lived with it a while you can't work without it.

[Guilt]

SSD Speed is addictive, It's like getting a bigger monitor - once you've lived with it a while you can't work without it.

I'm the same won't build another pc without one, I've even put one in my laptop.

But I think in e90's case the money would be better spent else where

[discordance]

I'm with B on ssds. Too lazy to cope with a small SSD capacity and consequent space management. I have 10k rpm drives and load into bf3s round-starting-nothing-happening time mostly. Very rarely the round starts before I get there but I miss about 2 seconds and its really hard to grab vehicles on round start anyway.

[CruelCow]

I wonder if the pop-in effect in open world games like GTA improves with an SSD...

[aquila]

SSD Speed is addictive, It's like getting a bigger monitor - once you've lived with it a while you can't work without it.

Option C - get a bigger monitor, its just like getting a SSD

Worth stretching the budget? bigger monitor

[Brahms]

I don't think so cruel, isn't that a VRAM limitation?