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.