Guidance on computer upgrade please.

[fragrantpanda]

Hello all,

First time poster, long time (albeit average) player and general all-round replay consumer.

I would like to upgrade my desktop without having to buy an entirely new one. Literally the only game I play is elite mod - i don't have much time to play that either.

It works fine and sometimes has no problems at all but i've noticed over the last 12 months that i'm more often than not being the last player to load up and often get the start game lag where everyone else buzzes off and my base takes a few seconds to load up.

Below is what i currently have. I know it's not top notch but maybe some of you guys might have a good idea of what the bottleneck is. Like I said i'm only interested in Elite Mod so don't need an cutting edge do everything fix - i just want something to speed up and smooth up DOW2.

I would appreciate any pointers. My current idea is to increase memory as much as possible and get a better video card. Would a SSD be worth an investment or not?

Be gentle

Asus Nvidia Geforce GT 630 4gb DDR3

CPU - Intel core 2 Quad 2.5 GHZ
Memory - 4GB
Average HDD

Thank you

FP

[welshy]

We need to know your motherboard and your case details.

I recently upgraded my PC a few months back and I couldn't do it using my motherboard as it was out of date. So I had to upgrade the whole lot, something you don't want I know.

[fragrantpanda]

Hello Welshy,

The motherboard is Packard Bell MCP73PVT-PM. I can add another 4GB of memory i just wondered whether it was worth upgrading the graphics card as well. Like i said it used to be fine but has only really started slowing down the last 6-12 months.

I don't really use the desktop for anything except DOW2 and the odd bit of editing so it's not rammed with programs or anything. Maybe it's just getting left behind.

Thanks for looking.

[Nurland]

How full is your HDD? Have you checked your task manager that you don't have any (heavy) applications running in the background? Have you tried defragmenting your HDD?

For that motherboard, you can't really upgrade the CPU.

GPU doesn't really help with the load times but if you are getting low fps in the game, then it will help.

Faster RAM (your current 4gb should be fine for DoW but newer DDR3/4 RAMs are faster) and an SSD should help the most with loading times. Faster RAM will likely need a new motherboard.

I have my operating system and the games I play the most on SSD and the rest on HDD and that really helps with system boot times and loading times of the games I play a lot.

[fragrantpanda]

Hi Nurland,

Cheers for the reply. In game I don't have any problems it's solely that slow load speed and often i find the very start of the game lags for a few seconds so i'm always last out of base but after that it runs dreamy and i've (touch wood) not had any crash issues.

So if it's just load times I will look into getting a SSD and see if that helps.

Thanks

[Nurland]

CPU is something that could help with the loading times as well. Tbh the SSD is the only part I would upgrade in your build without doing a completely new system.

[PhatE]

The Disk is probably the single most important part of the machine.

I've done countless upgrades on laptops that were trash and ready to be thrown out. All those laptops got reissued and ran faster than brand new ones since they were using a HDD rather than something with Flash such as an SSD. Fragmentation isn't an issue for Flash as well

SSD's are getting much cheaper these days but the only downside is probably their live span (typically shorter than a physical disk) and that data recovery is not available. Once the data is deleted, it's gone for good unless you have backups of course (previous versions/shadow copy).

If this were a RAMDISK then it would be a different story I'm pretty sure since RAM is insanely fast. SSD's are pricey though so you sacrifice space for cost. Get a SATA drive as well for storage and just have a few things on the SSD.

TL;DR Get a SSD for Windows and a few games. Get a HDD for movies and other shit.