Currently I have 4 gb's of ram. Right now my pc is moving slowly for I don't know why. What is weird is that FF is taking 730mb of ram-must be some bad flash advert causing the huge resource drain. I've also read this-http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/windows-7-4gb-vs-8gb-performance/ So I decided to upgrade to another 4 gb XMS2 ram. Right now I'm on a E5200 and my CPU usage is about 15% average. Sometimes it spikes up to 80%. Is it worth it to upgrade to a higher CPU? Will I see some real time benefits? Full system specs available in the signature. Currently the E5200 is not overclocked and with the stock cooler temp average of 27C. Heavy work apps simultaneously used include: photoshop, word (400 pages of images), excel (30 spreadsheet)-and music/video player playing in the background. I tend to have about 30 tabs in ff at the same time as well and constant closing-and opening FF. I have dual screen monitors and sometimes run 2 games on different monitors at the same time-though the games are slow I never see the CPU usage spike-but the RAM is the bottleneck.
In my opinion it's not worth getting a better CPU LGA775. If the size of your case permits + the overlockability (if thats a word) of your motherboard allows you to overlclock the cpu and get an aftermarket cooler (Artic Freezer 7 v2) With a better cooler (£17 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/176157) and some tweaking in the bios you could probably get another 1Ghz out of your CPU. This should give you better performance
What motherboard do you have? Just so it's clear to see what your overclocking options are. http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=201703 This thread above is the experience of a BT member overclocking the E5200 using a GB G31M-ES2L mobo.
Thanks for the feedback. The gigabyte has its onboard ET6 software and I did manage to get some OC but its slightly hopeless. I'm not sure if I should do it in the bios or the ET6 software - which actually controlls the bios
your e5200 and 4 gb of ram should be plenty to play the game and run your pc at a decent level of performance, oc or not. how often do you run pc optimization programs? spybot or w/e, defrag, things like that. give that a run. if you don't have an av, get one. clean your registry, things like that. should be good to go then. having said that, what version of excel and word are you running? what are the sizes of these files? if the files are big enough, no amount of ram on your single cpu pc will matter when it comes to running 400 page word docs with images and 30 excel spreadsheets, which is kinda ridiculous in the first place. if you truly feel like you need all that going on at the same time, which i can't imagine why anyone would, then your cpu is as much the problem as the ram if not more so, and i dont really think anything on the 775 socket will truly matter. additionally, and i could be wrong but i am pretty sure i am not, office is not multi-thread capable...there are ways to handle things within office more efficiently and are considered "multi-threaded" behavior, but i doubt you are able to take advantage of those options.
Thats me baby! Still on my E5200, but you can't go wrong with a second hand Q6600 or similar. I'm upgrading now to the quad core chip, and to be honest, i'm not worried about 1156 or sandy bridge just yet. But second hand is definitely the way to go for a cheap cpu upgrade. You can pick up a Q6600 for about £50 incl. in the marketplace every now and then. You can get 3.5ghz quite easily on your motherboard OP just by bumping up the fsb to about 280 with an extra 0.2v vcore . I think i used 1.3v for 3.5ghz, but started needing more volts at about 3.65Ghz. Then the little chip starts chewing volts! But temps will still be good up to about 3.8ghz. Don't do this on the stock cooler though! What speed is your memory?
Yes, waiting for you to reply This is my memory: http://www.corsair.com/twin2x4096-6400c5c.html Corsair XMS2 8 gb (4x2 gb) 5-5-5-18 I tried the onboard software failed. In fact aside from light OC's, anything everyone published online about their E5200...failed... The motherboard does support Q6600-but where do you find at £50
Don't OC from software. Use the BIOS. Increase your fsb to 280, and up your vcore to 1.3v. Make sure your ram divider puts your ram at 800mhz, and no more. If you want a Q6600, keep an eye on the Marketplace section of this forum. A lot of guys are upgrading their rigs to sandy bridge, so they end up selling their old stuff there.
I had an E5200 (running at 3.4ish from stock 2.5) on as cheap and cheerful Asus P5KPL-AM with 4Gb RAM. Recently purchased a Q6600 off the marketplace as a replacement and the difference with general application usage and boot time is certainly noticeable. I use Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 3 and Sony Vegas regularly, the latter showing the most striking improvement. Based on your PC usage I think a quad core would make sense as a drop in upgrade from the dual. As Nealie suggests, subscribe to the Marketplace forum for notifications on Q6600 sales, that would be your best bet and will keep you going for a good couple of years if you manage to nab one. Going rate is about £50-70. Heck, I'd consider buying another if I find one, to build a cheap work PC seeing as they are reluctant to budget for staff PC upgrades/replacements this year.
Not suffering from bootstrap issues? SHould be 266 right? Here is an atricle I found http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-phenom-pentium,2366-10.html I figured out why my pc is slow- running at 1.7 ghz.. 8.5x multiplier... I tried a FSB of 266 Mhz with 1.3v core-failed. Kept restarting. I am doing this on stock cooling. Right now I'm on a FSB of 233 with a 12.5x multiplier. However in this EasyTune6 software-it kept showing that my multiplier is either 12.5x or 6x. With the CPU being 2.9ghz and 1.4ghz. This is very frustrating. I did all the changes in the bios andn ot the program
is that in the bios? so then your fsb is set to 200? then yes, that would affect your performance. take a peak at the overclocking thread on this forum, then look at your bios. it's not as simple as just throwing volts at the vcore and upping the fsb.
Yep-I've changed it. I also noticed that since I placed the vcore to auto-gigabyte has a mine of its own randomly decreasing the voltage and multiplier speed. I'm guessing that this is idle-and gigabyte is trying to be eco here.
Personally, yes, although I'll qualify that by saying it genuinely depends on how you use your PC. It's easy to say yeah, everyone should go and buy a Q6600 or a i2500k, etc. but I think in reality a lot of us just don't have the cash and need to make careful decisions with regard to upgrades. I decided to buy the E5200 instead of a Q6600 a few years back, primarily as I couldn't afford it, but I also figured gaming (my primary usage at the time) wouldn't really require the extra cores and I would be overclocking the E5200 anyway. My plan was to eventually get the Q6600 second hand, which I did a couple of months ago for a great price from the bit-tech Marketplace. Always try and plan your upgrade path! Before I continue I should advise that my comparisons are based on an overclocked E5200 (stock 2.5Ghz to around 3.6Ghz) to an overclocked Q6600 (from stock 2.4Ghz to 3.3Ghz). I want to try and push it further when I have more free time to play. Anyway, my real world observations as follows: Boot time feels slightly faster, but the PC is noticeably quicker in reaching the 'usable' state if you know what I mean, once all startup programs have loaded and you start trying to do actually use the machine. General PC usage is nippier; for example, Firefox and Steam start noticeably faster. I've never really had any issue with multiple tabs slowing things down, that usually only results in more memory usage anyway (ranges between 100-800Mb). Gaming generally doesn't feel that much faster, although GTA 4 and Bad Company 2 do, both of which I consider to be games which really stress a system (no, I don't own Crysis!). I use a 4:3 aspect monitor at 1280x1024 so the affects may be more obvious for those at say, 1920x1080. Sony Vegas (video editing and rendering) is substantially faster. I am using the PC more for work purposes and the upgrade means I can work a heck of a lot more efficiently. Previewing a piece of work to check my timing and transitions on the E5200 could be hard to judge when working with multiple video tracks as the preview speed would slow down to 1-2fps. Speaking of video rendering, I encode a lot of DVD video using Handbrake for my iPhone and this is almost twice as fast. I also occasionally use Playclaw to record Battlefield: Bad Company 2 in game footage. The E5200 just couldn't handle it and the game would become unusably slow (2-20fps). Using the Q6600 there's almost no discernible difference between recording and not recording, so aside for the large amount of disk space required for the raw video, I often hit record just for the heck of it in case something amazing happens! Also, BC2 is now way more fun now that I'm not spending most of my time observing painful slowdown and can concentrate on the serious business of firing large quantities of M136 AT4 rounds into the rear armour of tanks, in a sexy high fps. I reckon an LGA775 system with a Q6600 and 4GB of RAM with a possible GFX upgrade later down the line is a feasible solution for another couple of years before you have to consider an upgrade, by which time you'll not only need a new CPU but realistically, also a socket change, so therefore a new motherboard and DDR3 RAM. On the plus side, at least DDR3 is stupidly cheap at the moment, it's almost worth buying some now just so you've got it for a future system.
Before i read the rest of the thread lol, i'll point out that the reason your multiplier and speed are changing is because its an energy saving feature commonly known as Intel speedstep. This can be turned off in the BIOS. I'm trying to remember what its called in the Bios though.... Edit: its called "CPU EIST FUNCTION". Set it to disabled and your multiplier will not change.
The e5200 has a max multiplier of 12.5x. The stock setting is 12.5x with 200fsb, giving you 2.5Ghz. If you go into the bios and change the fsb to 240, you will get a speed of 3.0Ghz. However, your ram multiplier must be changed to 3.33 to keep it at 800mhz (otherwise you will be overclocking your ram to 960mhz, and it won't boot). You should be able to do at least 3Ghz without touching the vcore. Why are you overclocking with Gigabyte's utility? This, plus you can use DDR3 memory on some 775 boards (G41 combo is one of them)
another thought. it's not just the q6600 that would be an option. i know there for awhile the newer q8xxx's were as cheap as a q6600, so look out for one of those if that ends up being the route you go. if you could grab one of those for the price you are looking at for a q6600, win... but again, office is not multi-threaded, so the extra 2 cores will not do anything for you in those apps.
Thanks for the feedback tripwired. I noticed that when I increased the FSB to 233- the motherboard auto increases the memory from 800 to 933. Maybe this is the cause of failure? Should I readjust back to 800 Mhz?
