SSDs aren’t cheap, and you lose a large amount (nearly 75 percent, in our case) of your storage capacity in the bargain. And in our tests, moving from a 7200-rpm, 500GB traditional hard-disk drive to a 120GB SSD resulted in a 8.0 percent boost on general apps and an 18.4 percent speed jump on gaming. Upgrading the hard drive: Solid-state-drive technology promises a dramatic decrease in hard-drive latency.
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The limited benefit that the upgrade provided in our tests made investing in more memory almost pointless -even though we were testing with a 64-bit OS that can use the full amount of memory. Similarly, our year-old Dell’s performance improved by just 3 percent when we moved from 4GB of RAM to 8GB. For example, when we bumped our 2GB system up to 4GB, we got a paltry 1.3 percent improvement on general apps and virtually no improvement on games. But if your PC already has even a moderate amount of RAM, you likely won’t see much of a speed increase from adding more.
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The upgrade is easy to perform, and it makes sense because RAM is cheap. Upgrading RAM: Conventional wisdom has always held that upgrading your system’s RAM will give it an instant boost. The Core 2 Duo upgrade rated as one of our best values in the entire study, costing a mere $2.91 for each percentage point of general performance improvement.
Graphics performance improved even more for both upgrades.īest of all, our CPU upgrades were affordable. Using an older 3.0GHz Core 2 Duo was even more effective, with a boost of 52.6 percent–probably due to the speedier frontside bus in the Core 2 Duo over the Core 2 Quad.
Moving to a 2.67GHz Core 2 Quad prompted a 36.8 percent jump in performance on general apps. Upgrading the CPU: Bumping our Polywell’s processor from a Pentium D to a Core 2-class chip yielded instant and obvious performance improvements across the board. This chart shows how much improvement in performance our test PCs showed after various hardware upgrades.