new RAM or new CPU?

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by helen321, Jan 18, 2005.

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  1. helen321

    helen321 Guest

    hi, my computer is too slow for my liking. can i get some advice from some of you here, please? :) should i get some RAM or do i need a new CPU. here are the specs -

    CPU intel(R) Celeron(TM) CPU
    1200MHz
    1.20 GHz

    RAM 128MB of RAM

    what do you think? and what kind of prices are they? thanks? :)
     
  2. BlueZannetti

    BlueZannetti Registered Member

    Joined:
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    Posts:
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    For many circumstances, you're running lean on the RAM. That would be the piece I upgraded at this point. The expected kick will be strongly dependent on the OS and applications you run. I get all my RAM from Crucial, but there are many reputable sites out there.

    Blue
     
  3. helen321

    helen321 Guest

    thanks, Spanner and Blue :) so out of the two, more RAM, rather than, a faster CPU, would give me the best performance increase? because at the moment if i click a program, in all programs, it will take a few seconds to load, whereas, on friend's computers it will load almost instantaniously.

    i'll have alook at my RAM specs and see what the prices are like at crucial. if CPU prices aren't too much i might think about a new processer too. what kind of performance increase would a CPU, at twice the speed (2.40 GHz) be like? thanks
     
  4. helen321

    helen321 Guest

    sorry, Blue my OS is XP :)
     
  5. rdsu

    rdsu Registered Member

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    helen321,

    if you can buy a new computer is better, if not, try to buy some memory and you will see a good speed on your computer.

    Normally, the Intel Celeron have the half of L2 Cache of the Intel, and this is feature is very important for performance...

    At this moment, the recommend size of RAM is 512MB, but if you use SDRAM the DIMM's now are very expensive because the search is rarer and the DDR or DDR2 is more faster...
     
  6. BlueZannetti

    BlueZannetti Registered Member

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    It all comes down to where your bottlenecks reside. If you are lean on RAM, you may have lots of swapping to the disk if the applications or OS you run have a heavy RAM footprint or you launch a number of applications at once. This is where the RAM performance hit comes from. Do you happen to know your system total and peak commit charge relative to physical RAM (see Windows Task Manager under Performance tab)? Basically, you want the average total commit charge under typical run conditions to be much less than physical RAM so that a reasonable system cache can be maintained.

    Doubling CPU speed basically doubles the speed of on-chip operations. If that's where you're bottlenecked, you'll see a doubling of performance. That's a very unlikely situation in real life. It's difficult to make a quantitative statement, even if you provided a lot more details, since it does depend on the hardware specifics of you system, the performance matching between various subsystems (many CPU, RAM throughput, video throughput, and disk I/O), and the application mix you run. Will it be faster? Of course. How much? No idea.

    Blue
     
  7. helen321

    helen321 Guest

    thanks, Spanner :) i'll have a look through the services, and start ups, now. im sure it will help to some degree, thanks for the idea. and "twice as much, twice as fast", i was hopeing that would be the case. it sounds good. if the price is right i'll try and get both. thanks for the help :)
     
  8. helen321

    helen321 Guest

    hi, Blue :) thanks for the great post. here are some of the specs in TM.

    Commit Charge. Physical Memory.
    total. 240512 Total. 129036
    Limit. 314204 Available. 14000
    Peak. 309632 System Cache. 42608

    it doesnt look too good :(
     
  9. BlueZannetti

    BlueZannetti Registered Member

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    Another way to look at this - it looks great since it is a completely unambiguous result! You need more RAM and a new CPU would buy little in the way of improved performance at this time. Depending on your system capabilities and RAM constraints, I'd pick up a 256 or 512 MB stick (if appropriate), or whatever gets you reasonably high. Heck, even another 128 MB stick would do wonders and be worth it.

    Blue
     
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