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 ONE-YEAR OLD PC
It might sound odd suggesting that you upgrade such a new PC, but there are plenty of people who’ve bought a budget PC last year with the intention to add more memory or install a faster processor when funds allowed. As many PCs came with Windows 7 64-bit, there are more gains to be had from upgrading memory since the 64-bit version can use all the memory you give it.
We’ve only considered budget PCs here, as there shouldn’t be any need to upgrade a relatively new mid-range or high-end PC just yet. We’ll start with Intel-based PCs. We’ve chosen a PC with a Core i3 530 processor and 2GB of RAM. Chances are, your PC already has 4GB of RAM, but we’ve done the benchmarking to show you how much extra speed you gain by adding another 2GB. Don’t forget that virtually all new PCs – and all Core i processors – use DDR3 memory, not DDR2.
A one-year old PC, shouldn’t need much work to get it up to modern standards
It was only high-spec PCs that had LGA1366 sockets, but newer PCs (especially those made in 2010) have LGA1156 sockets. As there are Pentium and Celeron chips available in the LGA1156 format, it’s possible that you could upgrade all the way from those to a Core i7 800-series chip. However, these are very expensive – the i7-860 for example costs well over £200 at the moment.
One interesting fact about the new Celeron, Pentium, and some Core i5 and i7 chips, is that they have integrated graphics. These can only be used with motherboards that have an H55, H57 or Q57 chipset – the graphics chip won’t work in a P55 motherboard. Gaming performance is poor, but it can handle playback of HD video, even 1080p.
If you recently bought an AMD-based PC, you’ll probably have a motherboard with a Socket AM3. This is the latest version, and all AM3 processors should work, regardless of chipset. Here, we’ve picked a typical budget PC with an Athlon II X4 620 with 2GB of RAM. If you have a Phenom II X2 processor, you may be able to unlock the two extra ‘hidden’ cores, but you’ll need to search for the option to do this in the BIOS – and it may not be available on your particular motherboard. There are no guarantees that the hidden cores will be operable, or stable, but it’s certainly worth trying as a free upgrade to a quad-core processor.
WHAT TO BUY
As we’ve said, it’s important to match the speed of your existing memory if you’re buying extra RAM. This should be obvious from the labels on the memory modules inside your PC. You should see something like PC3-8500, or DDR3-1066 (these are two ways of expressing the same DDR3 speed – 1,066MHz). If possible, try to buy the exact make and model. Currently, prices of DDR3 RAM are similar to DDR2, so expect to pay around £7 for a 2GB DDR3-1066 module, or £18 for a matched pair of 2GB sticks.
As our results show, adding an extra 2GB to a 64-bit Windows 7 PC is more of a benefit than our similar test on our two-year-old PC with a 32-bit version of Vista. Multitasking in particular shows the biggest improvement, with an average of a 10 per cent increase. For £7, this is very worthwhile.
Upgrading from a Core i3 530 to a Core i5 750 will give you roughly 30 per cent more performance, but this is relatively expensive at £145. Unless you’re going to be editing HD video or some other equally demanding task, there’s little point in making this upgrade as the Core i3 is powerful enough for just about any other task.
For the AMD PC, upgrading from 2GB to 4GB boosts performance by around 6 per cent, while upgrading simply to a Phenom II X4 965 makes that figure closer to 25 per cent. Upgrade both, and you’re looking at a 30 per cent improvement in power for just £94. If your PC already has 4GB of RAM, upgrading to the 965 will cost £87 and still make your almost 30 per cent faster.
FINAL COUNTDOWN
We’ve discovered that, somewhat surprisingly, extra memory doesn’t do very much to improve performance – assuming your PC already has 1GB of RAM. We’ve also shown that there’s a larger gain from adding memory if you have a 64-bit operating system.
The unsurprising result is that upgrading your processor is likely to make a much more noticeable difference to your PC’s performance. While this is a much more expensive option, it’s still considerably cheaper than buying a completely new base unit, or entire PC. You should now be equipped with the knowledge you need to choose the best upgrade for your PC, and see that you needn’t always resort to getting rid of the machine under your desk.
On the next page are a couple of appendices about overheating and updating your BIOS
