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Worth getting extra 1GB memory for Athlon 3400 running XP?
I am in the UK. Is it worth upgrading the memory in my old WinXP PC? It's
an Athlon 3400+ (socket 939) with 1GB PC3200. It has an empty memory slot, I can add 1GB to make the total 2GB. Is the performance improvement worthwhile or is it likely to be very modest? 1GB PC3200 costs about £30. Alternatively would it be better to save the £30 towards a new system unit? (I can afford about £250 to £300.) |
#2
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Worth getting extra 1GB memory for Athlon 3400 running XP?
On Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:29:07 +0000, Sandi wrote:
I am in the UK. Is it worth upgrading the memory in my old WinXP PC? It's an Athlon 3400+ (socket 939) with 1GB PC3200. It has an empty memory slot, I can add 1GB to make the total 2GB. Is the performance improvement worthwhile or is it likely to be very modest? 1GB PC3200 costs about £30. Alternatively would it be better to save the £30 towards a new system unit? (I can afford about £250 to £300.) To some degree, it depends what you use the system for. If it's just web-browsing, Office type apps ect, you won't see a significant difference going from 1 to 2GB; certainly nothing like the difference between 512MB and 1GB. OTOH, if you regularly manipulate large files, for example using Photoshop with RAW files, it will make a small difference. If it was my money, I'd be putting it towards the new system... Chris -- Remove prejudice to reply. |
#3
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Worth getting extra 1GB memory for Athlon 3400 running XP?
On Wed, 26 Jan 2011 11:29:07 GMT
Sandi wrote: I am in the UK. Is it worth upgrading the memory in my old WinXP PC? It's an Athlon 3400+ (socket 939) with 1GB PC3200. It has an empty memory slot, I can add 1GB to make the total 2GB. Is the performance improvement worthwhile or is it likely to be very modest? Monitor your memory usage - if you're swapping much then it will probably help, if not it probably won't, unless the times when it does occasionally swap a significant amount impairs the usability i.e. those are the times you find yourself wishing it would hurry up, so it may make a significant qualitative difference even though quantitatively it's fairly trivial. Having said that, removing one bottleneck usually serves only to reveal another one somewhere else. |
#4
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Worth getting extra 1GB memory for Athlon 3400 running XP?
"Sandi" wrote in message ... I am in the UK. Is it worth upgrading the memory in my old WinXP PC? It's an Athlon 3400+ (socket 939) with 1GB PC3200. It has an empty memory slot, I can add 1GB to make the total 2GB. Is the performance improvement worthwhile or is it likely to be very modest? 1GB PC3200 costs about £30. Alternatively would it be better to save the £30 towards a new system unit? (I can afford about £250 to £300.) As others have said, what applications do you want to speed-up? If you like having several applications open at the same time, having 2GB rather than 1 will help. One alternative to extra RAM is to replace the system drive with an SSD, if it is SATA. Not cheap, but that would make everything that isn't processor-bound much faster and you could later transfer the SSD into a new system. HTH -- Rob |
#5
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Worth getting extra 1GB memory for Athlon 3400 running XP?
"Rob" wrote in message ... "Sandi" wrote in message ... I am in the UK. Is it worth upgrading the memory in my old WinXP PC? It's an Athlon 3400+ (socket 939) with 1GB PC3200. It has an empty memory slot, I can add 1GB to make the total 2GB. Is the performance improvement worthwhile or is it likely to be very modest? 1GB PC3200 costs about £30. Alternatively would it be better to save the £30 towards a new system unit? (I can afford about £250 to £300.) As others have said, what applications do you want to speed-up? If you like having several applications open at the same time, having 2GB rather than 1 will help. One alternative to extra RAM is to replace the system drive with an SSD, if it is SATA. Not cheap, but that would make everything that isn't processor-bound much faster and you could later transfer the SSD into a new system. HTH -- Rob I buy and sell SSD's whole sale and depending on the system they are fitted to they will and don't make any real world difference from a fast SATA drive as the the disks capabilities far out pace what the chipset can deliver, OCZ, crucial and intel drives tested on older systems using single core CPU showed less than 5% gain and the drives were not running any where like what they were capable of. The Western Digital VelociRaptor 150GB 10000RPM SATA-II 16MB Cache or the Seagate Momentus XT 250GB Hybrid SATA-II 2.5" 7200RPM 32MB offered the same performance in older systems at a vastly reduced cost. PC3200 is currently going up in price as DDR 3 is coming down as manufacturers switch production as DDR 3 is becoming more common. Personally I would take a peek round some car boot sales and see if you can pick up a stick of memory really cheap. Then if your not happy with the result, sell the system on for £50 and buy a newer one. |
#6
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Worth getting extra 1GB memory for Athlon 3400 running XP?
Sandi wrote:
I am in the UK. Is it worth upgrading the memory in my old WinXP PC? It's an Athlon 3400+ (socket 939) with 1GB PC3200. It has an empty memory slot, I can add 1GB to make the total 2GB. Is the performance improvement worthwhile or is it likely to be very modest? 1GB PC3200 costs about £30. Alternatively would it be better to save the £30 towards a new system unit? (I can afford about £250 to £300.) For £300, you could probably do a motherboard-CPU-ram upgrade. About a year ago, I did a motherboard-CPU-ram change-out for about $300 CDN. And you should be able to come up with something to match that. These two examples, cost a bit more than my upgrade, but also give more than twice the performance of my system. Both of these examples have built-in video, so that, if your current video card doesn't fit the slots, the motherboard will provide the video for you. ******* Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz LGA1155 6MB £179.98 http://www.dabs.com/products/intel-c...efs=4294947370 I selected a microATX board, because I don't know the size of your current motherboard. "Gigabyte GA-H67MA-D2H LGA1155 Intel H67 DDR3 uATX" £84.99 http://www.dabs.com/products/gigabyt...efs=4294947373 And two of these, for 2GB total memory KVR1333D3N9/1G. Kingston ValueRAM 1GB DDR3 1333MHz / PC3-10600 Non-ECC CL9 DIMM £11.38 each http://www.dabs.com/products/kingsto...dimm-72K6.html 179.98+84.99+11.38+11.38= £287.73 That would be many times faster than your current system. Probably double the speed in single threaded code. And many times more in multithreaded code, due to the additional cores. http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id...ec-codes=SR008 Note - I tried to keep the price of the motherboard and RAM low enough, so I could afford a real nice processor. ******* Now, if I wanted to put together a modern AMD system, it might save a bit of money, and be a hair slower. And you probably wouldn't notice. I say that, because when I compare two fast systems here, one faster than the other, if I was blindfolded, I couldn't tell the systems apart. At some point, the behavior of the OS tends to hide the differences, and they feel about the same. AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4GHz 8MB cache AM3 socket £132.75 http://www.dabs.com/products/amd-phe...efs=4294951761 microATX motherboard with a good selection of interface types Gigabyte AM3 AMD 880G DDR3 ATX GA-880GMA-UD2H £77.76 http://www.dabs.com/products/gigabyt...-atx-6ZXK.html http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/13-128-445-Z03?$S640W$ http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/13-128-445-Z02?$S640W$ http://www.gigabyte.com/support-down....aspx?pid=3632 Just for kicks, switch to 2x2GB of RAM. About double the price of the other two, separate sticks. This comes as a kit with two sticks in it. KVR1333D3N9K24G 2x2GB DDR3-1333 CL9 £49.99 http://www.dabs.com/products/kingsto...-pin-5KNM.html 132.75+77.76+49.99= £260.50 There is plenty of adjustment room on the price, but of course, if you go with the cheapest AMD processor, it won't be as much of an upgrade. This would be socket AM3, and might be faster than your 3400+. In AMD parlance, this might be equivalent to a 6000+ or so. They've changed their scheme yet again, making it harder to compare old and new. But this would be roughly a 6000+. The speed of the £132.75 processor above, is mostly evident when you're shrinking DVD movies, and probably when running Photoshop. But if all you do is surf the web, this might be a good enough upgrade. (I use a dual core here, and no complaints. I don't process enough video, to be annoyed when rendering a movie file takes longer than I'd like.) AMD Athlon II X2 250 3.0GHz 2MB AM3 65W Processor £44.98 http://www.dabs.com/products/amd-ath...efs=4294951761 Now, if I switch to 2GB of memory, and use the cheap processor, my cost is 44.98+77.76+11.38+11.38= £145.50 and it's still an upgrade. ******* If you have a retail installer CD for your current WinXP install, then moving the install to the new motherboard shouldn't be a problem. ******* I've run my current generation of system, with 1GB, 2GB, and 4GB of RAM. (I had 6GB in it a few days ago, but dropped back to 4GB again.) 1GB - my favorite game just fits into available memory. No room for multitasking, such as alt-tab out of the 3D game, and read USENET posts. It might swap to the page file, if I try to do too much. 2GB - now I can game and do other things. On a 32 bit OS, this is the best bang for the buck upgrade, when buying RAM. If you don't play 3D games, then 1GB might be plenty. 2GB covers just about everything. 4GB - allows me to run VirtualPC 2007, and have up to three other OSes running on the computer, at the same time as WinXP. I can run a copy of Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Windows 98, while WinXP is running. All at the same time. Windows 98 is my "file server" :-) 6GB - Using WinXP x32 OS, plus the dataram.com free ramdisk software, I can move the C: drive pagefile, to utilize the 2GB of ram above the 4GB mark. It allows the 4GB of regular RAM, to be used with fewer hesitations. Since the system behavior wasn't "perfect enough", I've since switched back to 4GB RAM, and having the pagefile on C: again. This is the only example I know of, where WinXP 32 bit edition, can use RAM above 4GB. It's possible, because the dataram.com ramdisk runs as a driver, at the kernel level, and can "fool around", unlike a regular application. 2GB is the sweet spot, unless you have money to waste. I can game and run one virtual machine with that. I get to play with 6GB of RAM, by ripping the memory out of a second computer :-) Paul |
#7
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Worth getting extra 1GB memory for Athlon 3400 running XP?
On 26/01/2011 11:29, Sandi wrote:
I am in the UK. Is it worth upgrading the memory in my old WinXP PC? It's an Athlon 3400+ (socket 939) with 1GB PC3200. It has an empty memory slot, I can add 1GB to make the total 2GB. Is the performance improvement worthwhile or is it likely to be very modest? Very modest I think. Try this. Load up your normal selection of programs, and play with it a while. Then bring up task manager (right-click task bar) and look at the performance tab. In the 'Commit Charge' box, look at the peak value. If that is hovering near or is more than the amount of memory in the box (minus any reserved for built-in graphics) then splashing out on more memory might improve that one - though in that case on XP, I'd ask questions on all bits of software why they are consuming that much and can't they cut back? A faster hard drive might bring more benefit, and prices of those have fallen. -- Adrian C 1GB PC3200 costs about £30. Alternatively would it be better to save the £30 towards a new system unit? (I can afford about £250 to £300.) |
#8
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Worth getting extra 1GB memory for Athlon 3400 running XP?
Note to Chris: Your reply was after the sigdash delimiter line that you
left in your quoted content Wouldn't be a problem with a functional newsreader that would prefix "" to the quoted content. Proper quoting was lost in v15 of Windows Live Mail (i.e., it got even worse). Because you are using a defective newsreader, and when replying, make sure your reply is NOT after a sigdash delimiter line ("-- \n") that is no longer quoted. Trim and edit the quoted content in your reply. Also, if you continue using WLM v15 then show some delineation between your reply and the quoted content, like separating them with a dash-line or do the "" prefixing that WLM v15 no longer provides. Chris wrote: Rob wrote ... One alternative to extra RAM is to replace the system drive with an SSD, if it is SATA. Not cheap, but that would make everything that isn't processor-bound much faster and you could later transfer the SSD into a new system. I buy and sell SSD's whole sale and depending on the system they are fitted to they will and don't make any real world difference from a fast SATA drive as the the disks capabilities far out pace what the chipset can deliver, You sure the problem isn't with misalignment of the sectors on the device? SSDs use 4KB blocks instead of the old 512KB blocks; however, pre-Vista versions of Windows created partitions starting at sector 63, not 64. The result is instead of doing just a write that a read-modify- write cycle must be used. With AFD (Advanced Format Drives) that use 4KB blocks (but the interface translates to 512KB blocks for compatibility), there is a jumper setting to translate sectors by +1 (so addressing sector 63 at the interface ends up addressing sector 64 on the platters). Alternatively, you use something like Western Digitals alignment program. For example, users sticking in a Western Digital "Green" AFD drive in a USB case find they get poor write performance unless they do the jumpering or re-alignment. Using SSDs requires thinking about alignment problems. I'm not an expert on this but have read enough to know that I put one in my Windows system that it would be something I'd have to do more research to make sure the setup was correct. http://www.storagereview.com/impact_misalignment http://support.wdc.com/product/downloadsw.asp?sid=123 SSDs aren't just something you shove into your box and expect it work as-is. You need to plan that hardware configuration. OCZ, crucial and intel drives tested on older systems using single core CPU showed less than 5% gain and the drives were not running any where like what they were capable of. It's not likely that SSDs would get installed in old computers stuck with 1-core CPUs. Doesn't seem a fair test for the typical deployment of SSDs. Processes that are CPU bound in a 1-core setup are going to be just as CPU bound no matter what mass storage subsystem you add to your computer. The Western Digital VelociRaptor 150GB 10000RPM SATA-II 16MB Cache More RPM = more noise. Performance is nice but not everyone gets to hide their system case inside a closet. or the Seagate Momentus XT 250GB Hybrid SATA-II 2.5" 7200RPM 32MB offered the same performance in older systems at a vastly reduced cost. 7200 RPM platters paired with NAND memory. http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/pro...ops/laptop-hdd Interesting but remember that, like with SSDs, that use is destructive due to oxide stress. Solid-state drives will catastrophically fail when they run out of reserve memory used to map (mask out) the bad blocks, and with more mapping over time the slower the device. Using SSDs or hybrids with flash memory means you really need to employ a recovery scheme, like mirroring or, at least, daily image backups (or at shorter intervals depending on how critical is your loss of data). PC3200 is currently going up in price as DDR 3 is coming down as manufacturers switch production as DDR 3 is becoming more common. Personally I would take a peek round some car boot sales and see if you can pick up a stick of memory really cheap. In addition, even for an old motherboard, pairing up with another memory module may enable dual-channel mode for an addition 5-17% performance boost. This is likely an increase you'll see in a benchmark but doesn't necessary map to real-world use. Then if your not happy with the result, sell the system on for £50 and buy a newer one. Assuming the OP can afford a whole new computer system versus the much cheaper cost of adding a stick of memory. |
#9
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Worth getting extra 1GB memory for Athlon 3400 running XP?
On 26/01/2011 17:39, Chris wrote:
"Rob" wrote in message ... "Sandi" wrote in message ... I am in the UK. Is it worth upgrading the memory in my old WinXP PC? It's an Athlon 3400+ (socket 939) with 1GB PC3200. It has an empty memory slot, I can add 1GB to make the total 2GB. Is the performance improvement worthwhile or is it likely to be very modest? 1GB PC3200 costs about £30. Alternatively would it be better to save the £30 towards a new system unit? (I can afford about £250 to £300.) As others have said, what applications do you want to speed-up? If you like having several applications open at the same time, having 2GB rather than 1 will help. One alternative to extra RAM is to replace the system drive with an SSD, if it is SATA. Not cheap, but that would make everything that isn't processor-bound much faster and you could later transfer the SSD into a new system. HTH I buy and sell SSD's whole sale and depending on the system they are fitted to they will and don't make any real world difference from a fast SATA drive as the the disks capabilities far out pace what the chipset can deliver, OCZ, crucial and intel drives tested on older systems using single core CPU showed less than 5% gain and the drives were not running any where like what they were capable of. The Western Digital VelociRaptor 150GB 10000RPM SATA-II 16MB Cache or the Seagate Momentus XT 250GB Hybrid SATA-II 2.5" 7200RPM 32MB offered the same performance in older systems at a vastly reduced cost. PC3200 is currently going up in price as DDR 3 is coming down as manufacturers switch production as DDR 3 is becoming more common. Personally I would take a peek round some car boot sales and see if you can pick up a stick of memory really cheap. Then if your not happy with the result, sell the system on for £50 and buy a newer one." Chris, I had to manually quote your message as your newsreader screwed-up after the sig-separator. I've just moved to Thunderbird as I was sick of mine (OE) screwing-up various things, but it was a bitch to configure as I didn't want it saving stuff to its' default locations (I have limited space on a network roaming profile.) I recommend TB though and it would be a cinch on a standalone PC. This reply is therefore a bit of a test as much as anything else.. A lot depends on usage. If a fast boot is important, an SSD I recently fitted to an old fully-defragmented P4 system (cloned original drive) improved that from ~3m30s to ~30s. Starting large applications such as photoshop is now virtually instantaneous. The advantage of SSDs over spinning metal is that there is virtually no latency. I've built and support hundreds of systems and in every case replacing a boot HD with an SSD has massively improved responsiveness. First choice is always to increase RAM of course, but IME that has diminishing returns (for XP and other 32-bit OS) once you reach the 'sweet-spot' of ~1.5GB. If customer has the money, my normal system has 2GB RAM, a 64GB SSD as boot drive and 2TB Hitachi for data. Those who need data redundancy get RAID options and/or external storage of course. One of my own systems (used for astro number-crunching and image manipulation) has 2x64GB SSD in RAID 0 as system drive and 4x2TB in RAID 10 for data (plus another 4 x 2TB in external e-sata RAID10 box.) That i7-based Win7-x64 system with 16GB RAM, flies (but cost a bloody fortune!) Sometimes things open so fast that I actually miss them and open a second instance by mistake.. Cheers, -- Rob |
#10
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Worth getting extra 1GB memory for Athlon 3400 running XP?
Chris wrote:
X-Newsreader: Microsoft Windows Live Mail 15.4.3508.1109 I agree with VanguardLH and Rob; your current v. of WLM is not a satisfactory/compliant news agent and you should change to some agent which is compliant. Some examples of alternatives are Thunderbird and Windows Mail. Many if not most previous users of OE went to Tbird when they discovered that MS didn't include an agent with Win7. A few of them went to the trouble to enable Windows Mail (not Live Mail) to work with Win7. Windows Mail is the agent which came operational with Vista but not Win7. It is very similar to OE. TBird is easier to install in Win7 than WM; other agents have some advantages over Tbird. I am an OE and WM and Tbird user. -- Mike Easter |
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