Charlie Hoffpauir wrote:
My genealogy program will create a very large file for Word that I
have been saving as a PDF for distribution at the family reunion each
year. The file is currently over 3000 pages. If I try to do any
editing in Word, it takes forever. Is there any way to change hardware
or add something to make this work reasonalby fast? I currently have
Word in my C Drive which is a Samsung 500 GB SSD. I plan on replacing
it with a Samsung 1 TB nvme. The genealogy program runs on the C drive
also, but the data is on a HDD. When I add the nvme, should I put the
data on the nvme, or would it be better to put it on the repurposed
500 GB SSD, or does it make any difference?
TIA for any suggestions.

Decades ago, we noticed Word was compute-bound.

A faster processor might speed it up. (Speed = CLK * IPC, and
each generation of processor adds about 10% to 20% IPC or so.
The clock CLK being a bit stagnant.) IPC is Instructions Per Clock,
the number of instructions that can be "retired" in a single
clock cycle, about 4 instructions per clock or so at the moment.
That's a measure of the "burst rate" inside the CPU.

The 5950X is 4.9GHz, but the 5800X at 4.7GHz is a better
deal from a price perspective. The Zen3 processors were
more or less a paper launch, and they're hard to find.
Just as two batches of video cards (AMD had a batch,
NVidia had a batch) are also unobtanium. The CPU World site
puts a table at the bottom, with devices for the same socket
listed, so you can compare them.

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Zen/A...9%205950X.html

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Zen/A...7%205800X.html

Numerically on clock rate, you could select an Intel one,
but the IPC might be slightly less.

(Cheaper, still good for Word)

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_...i7-10700K.html

(Playing the same game as AMD and bumping the clock a hair...)

https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Core_...i9-10900K.html

But this is Word we're talking about, and 3000 pages *is*
a lot of pages. Even my preferred editor would be slow
and unruly at that size. Part of the delay can be working
out pagination.

It would be worse, if it was 3000 pages and every page had
a picture of a family member in it :-)

Back in the day, when some of the enthusiast sites wanted
to bench a processor, they would use a Word scrolling test
as their benchmark :-) That's how you know how pathetic Word
is, when they're using it as a benchmark like that. Back then,
a good video card did help, because there were some really
bad video cards back then (unaccelerated).

*******

With modern large machines, once the file is read from end
to end (at the very first thing), now the file is cached
in RAM and there is no reason to touch the disk again
until it is time to do a save. Scrolling the document,
should consult the System Read Cache in memory.

As you scroll, the program will stop every once in a
while and update the screen. If the program was clever,
it could give a good deal of the rendering work to the
video card. Modern OSes do some of their font rendering
on the video card, rather than the CPU drawing each letter.
But I don't follow Word enough, to be able to tell you
how the latest version does things.

The thing is, video cards have 2D acceleration (BitBLT)
and 3D acceleration (as used in gaming). Nobody really
benchmarks BitBLT any more, and it's quite possible there
is no advancement at all in 2D. And it's just possible that
a few things Word does, would be 2D functions. As a result
of that, it would be disingenuous to promise that a
new video card would do a damn thing. It might not.
This might suggest no difference between a monster video
card and a cheaper one (they could have the same 2D speed).

The Intel processors above have a graphics chip inside them,
so initially you don't even need to plug in a video card.
(AMD has chips like that too, with a GPU inside, but they
probably don't clock at 4.9GHz. AMD CPUs that have a GPU
inside are called "APU", not that this is a big deal.)

But a processor is going to help a bit.

Just don't expect hardware to wring 10X the speed out
of anything. Those kinds of improvements stopped years
ago.

But if your machine is frightfully bad, well, a new
CPU is not going to hurt. And with a new CPU comes
new motherboard and new RAM. The RAM speed now is up
to 3200 or 3600.

Currently the market is a bit skewed by availability
issues. And so we can't just arbitrarily select the
thing we really want, and expect to be able to buy it.
And some of the problem is old-fashioned scalping.
On the video card front, the rumor is, some
"Bitcoin people" bought $175,000,000 worth of video
cards, and it is preventing game players from buying
the newest video cards. Since CPUs aren't nearly as
attractive, I don't think anyone did that to the CPU
products.

Now, let's compare our CPUs. This site would list your
existing CPU, so you can compare to the new ones, and
get some idea of the level of improvement. I picked
the single threaded bench, because for ordinary applications
it is the best indicator of relative performance.

The Intel runs a higher clock, but the IPC is lower,
and so the bench value is a bit lower. It wasn't that long
ago, that previous generations of AMD had lower IPC. That's
why AMD is on my chart this year :-) And for a laugh, when
I don't know an OPs processor, I put my own pathetic one
for comparison. That's the E8400 I'm typing on. Part of
the speed decline on mine, is slow RAM.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

Bench
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 3400/4900 MHz 16C/32T 3,518 $799.99 NotAvail
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 3800/4700 MHz 8C/16T 3,515 $449.99 NotAvail ===
Intel i9-10900K 3700/5200 MHz 10C/20T 3,173 $529.89 Maybe
Intel i7-10700K 3800/5100 MHz 8C/16T 3,086 $319.99 Maybe

E8400 3000 MHz 2C/2T 1,242 cheep (Used)

So that shows, if I wanted a straight line improvement in performance,
a 5800X would be pretty close to 3X improvement on what I've got.

If you browse computers at the computer store, you won't get the
fastest ones there. You'll probably have to do some Internet browsing
if you want something decent.

The core count on the processors is mostly irrelevant for Word.
For Excel, Excel has some parallelism in execution, and might use
two cores (2C worth) when recalculating a spreadsheet. And it's
applications like 7ZIP file compression that really like cores.
If we were spending all day compressing files, then the eight hundred
dollar processor would be a bit better. If you play games, the
multiple cores (C) helps. THe (T) part measures Hyperthreading,
which helps 7ZIP a bit. But it's the C number that bears most
of the weight when doing 7ZIP (or RAR) compression. For your Word
purposes, the following table is almost completely irrelevant. But
is included to explain where the stupid pricing comes from. You
can see my little processor is dwarfed by these monsters, on 7ZIP.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html (Multi-thread bench)
(where cores count)

Bench
AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 3400/4900 MHz 16C/32T 46,243 $799.99 NotAvail
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 3800/4700 MHz 8C/16T 28,761 $449.99 NotAvail ===
Intel i9-10900K 3700/5200 MHz 10C/20T 24,110 $529.89 Maybe
Intel i7-10700K 3800/5100 MHz 8C/16T 19,630 $319.99 Maybe

E8400 3000 MHz 2C/2T 1,155 cheep (Used) Poor at 7ZIP

Paul