How fast a PC do you REALLY want?

PCpro magazine published last month (July 2013) a very interesting article under the above title. They tested similar PC configurations with variations in CPU (single, dual and quad core), memory (single and dual channel, fast and slow, capacity, etc.), disk drives (old, modern, hybrid and SSD) plus interconnects (USB2, USB3 and Thunderbolt).


These tests included their Real World benchmark plus common tasks such as copying folders, restarting Windows and loading game levels. It was a very interesting read and they certainly dispelled a few technical myths and confirmed many of my suspicions about modern hardware configurations. For example:

• great performance increases as you increased the CPU core count, but Hyper-Threading had little impact
• 4Gb of memory is the new 'sweet spot' for performance gains and dual channel and fast memory shows little impovement
• reboot of Windows is not a great test on overall system performance; 2Gb reboots just as fast as 4Gb
• laptop and old desktop HDDs are slow; modern 7,200rpm HDDs are much better but SSD is the way to go
• USB 3 with an SSD drive is blazingly fast.  The future of backups?

Unfortunately this article is not available online (yet?) but it makes a fascinating read.   The last interesting fact is from the overall system comparison; the Lenovo Atom-powered, Windows 8 tablet took a crippling 39 minutes to reboot Windows compared to the self-built gaming system's 23 seconds.

A vast improvement

I recently negotiated a good discount on what is the fastest DELL system that I have ever bought. The Vostro 270 mini-tower comes with a Intel i5-3470 quad core processor. Though not considered a high-end CPU, this 3.2GHz (turbo boost up to 3.6GHz) appears in responsiveness and benchmarks (PCmark7 4,811) to be much faster than the dual core 3.3GHz Intel i3-3220 model (PCmark7 2,792), which is considered to be a good budget gaming processor. The £50 price difference is probably well worth it.

There are two flies in the ointment:

• Intel has just released its latest 'Haswell' successor to the 'Ivy Bridge' i5-3470. The i5-4570 3.2GHz offers slightly better performance with lower energy usage. DELL has already introduced these into its premier XPS 8700 and Optiplex 9020 lines but with a hefty price premium over the £25 that just the CPU price difference would indicate. Presumably these processors will migrate to the mid-range Vostro models in the course of time.
• The 'balance' of the gaming system is probably affected. If you spend and extra £50 on the CPU you should also spend £50 extra or more on the graphics card. But the DELL supplied 300W PSU is then proably too weak and doesn't have the extra PCI-EX graphics card power connection that would be required.

All things considered, this is a very good bang-for-the-buck upgrade.