The relative guide to upgrading
We benchmark five, three and one-year old PCs and then apply various upgrades to see what makes the most difference
THE THREE-YEAR OLD PC
If you bought a PC in 2008 and spent around £700, you may have a quad-core processor and 4GB of RAM. Depending on the exact processor, it could still be fast enough for your needs today. If you’ve noticed your PC becoming sluggish, it may be the result of too many services starting with Windows. A quick bit of spring cleaning in MSconfig to disable all the unnecessary startup programs could be all you need to restore order.
However, if you spent less money or have only a dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM (or less), you might benefit from an upgrade in both departments. Intel-based PCs from the time aren’t upgradeable to the latest Core i3, i5 or i7 processors, but you could still install a Core 2 Quad Q8200 as long as your motherboard supports its 1,333MHz FSB.
A three-year old PC, it looks fine, but a CPU upgrade could make it much faster
As AMD had dropped the ball in 2008, the vast majority of PCs were sold with Intel Core 2 Duo processors. AMD’s chips were comparatively slower than the equivalent-priced Intel CPU and, for this reason, we have assumed that virtually no-one will have a two-year old AMD-based PC and we haven’t included any benchmark results for one.
If you did buy one, you’ll almost certainly have a motherboard with an AM2+ socket. This means you should be able to upgrade to the latest AMD chips, such as the Phenom II X4 965. As we’ve already said, check your motherboard manual, and the manufacturer’s website for BIOS updates. In general AM2+ motherboards will happily accept the latest AM3 processors. Both the Athlon II X2 250 (£42) and the Phenom II X4 965 (£87) are great choices.
WHAT TO BUY
Once again, we see that upgrading memory makes little difference. Adding an extra 2GB does little to improve benchmark scores. In fact, it’s worth pointing out that most two-year old PCs had a 32-bit version of Windows and 32-bit Windows can address only around 3.2GB of memory. This means you’re effectively adding just over 1GB of memory, but paying for 2GB. However, given the low premium of 2GB modules over 1GB ones, you might as well buy a larger module if your board will take it.
The other option is to replace your processor. The best-value choice for a quad-core CPU, as we’ve said, is the Core 2 Quad Q8200. Your motherboard should support this chip, but check your motherboard manual and the manufacturer’s website for any BIOS updates that add support before shelling out £105 for it. Of course, as you can see from the graphs, the Q8200 isn’t much faster than a Core 2 Duo E7400, which many PCs would have come with in 2008.
The E7400 is actually faster than the Q8200 in single-threaded applications (such as our image editing benchmark), so it’s only worth upgrading if you’re planning to use software that you already know will use all four cores. Our video encoding test, for example, saw a 22 per cent speed boost when we upgraded. Conversely, the image editing test was around 16 per cent slower.
Naturally, if your PC has a slower processor than the E7400, you’ll see a bigger increase. If not, you’ll probably come to the same conclusion that we did: it isn’t worth spending over £100 for such a little overall performance gain. Unfortunately, in this situation, you’re better off buying a new PC base unit.
