Brett C. asked: I am a student living in off-campus housing, so needless to say I’m pretty broke! A couple of years ago, I inherited what I thought was a pretty nice computer. It has an Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 processor, an Abit AW9D-MAX 975X motherboard, 4GB of DDR2-1066 RAM, a Radeon X1950 XTX, a Seagate 7,200rpm 500GB hard drive, a 750W PSU, DVD burner, etc.—all stuffed into an Antec case. I use the system mostly for schoolwork, Web browsing, and watching movies, and the only games I really play are World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2. I am thinking about giving Left 4 Dead 2 and Modern Warfare 2 a shot, though, because everyone is talking about them!

The problem is that my hard drive just bit the bust. I would like to fix my system on the cheap, but through school I found out I can get a copy of Windows 7 at a huge discount, so I’m thinking about just building a new system since I have to install my OS from scratch anyway. I used to run Vista; at times it really felt sluggish, but I’m not sure if that was Vista’s fault or my hardware’s. I’m writing to see if you’ll talk me into upgrading (and eating nothing but ramen noodles for a few months!) or if you think my system is good enough as-is and I should just replace my hard drive.

A: Well, Brett, our inner enthusiast says upgrade to the fastest hardware you can afford, enjoy the newfound performance, and never look back, but our practical side thinks you have some pretty good hardware already at your disposal (so there’s no need to deprive yourself of three square meals a day). Although the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 is undeniably slower than the high-end processors currently in Intel’s and AMD’s lineups, it’s more than fast enough to handle the workloads you mention and will be fine running the games you currently play or want to play.

In addition, updates made to the thread scheduler and the core of Win7 itself make the OS much more capable of exploiting the Hyper-Threading feature in the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 CPU. Win7 won’t make the 965 perform like a true quad-core, but its ability to more efficiently handle multithreaded workloads and manage them properly on logical processor cores will make better use of your processor’s resources (not to mention the boost your system will realize from the myriad of other performance enhancements that come from Microsoft’s latest OS).

With that said, spending a few bucks on upgrading just a few components in your rig will breathe new life into it and make it perform exponentially better. If we were in your shoes, we’d pick up a fast, cheap hard drive for bulk storage, a new video card that offers HD video acceleration, and a cheap SSD for your OS drive. That may sound like a lot, but you could easily gather all of these things up for around $350. Not exactly chump change, but it’s a heck of a lot less money than you’d have to spend to build an entirely new rig.

To be more specific, we’d recommend a Kingston SSDNow V Series SNV125-S2 40GB SSD ($115) for the OS volume, a Western Digital Caviar Blue WD6400AAKS 640GB 7,200rpm hard drive ($65) for bulk storage, and an AMD ATI Radeon HD 5770 ($159). Upgrading to an SSD is one of the most significant ways to increase a system’s performance today. The WD hard drive is fast, cheap, and offers more capacity than your current HDD. The Radeon HD 5770 will not only give your system the ability to smoothly play virtually any video format, but it’ll also improve gaming performance. And the Radeon will take advantage of DirectX 11 and Windows 7’s built-in DirectCompute features, too, such as video transcoding. That’s a whole lot of bang for 350 bucks.

Chris B. asked: Over the past year or so, I’ve rebuilt my system a couple of times and have migrated over from a previous AMD platform to Intel’s new Core i7 with an X58 chipset board (Evga X58 3X SLI). Here are the rest of my system specs:

• Intel Core i7-950 3.06GHz

• 6GB Kingston DDR3-1333

• GeForce GTX 285

• WD Caviar Black 1TB

• Onboard sound

• Internal DVD RW and Blu-ray drives

• Hauppauge WinTV tuner card

• Win7 64-bit

I primarily use this system as an entertainment PC, along with some fairly rigorous video editing and DVD burning I do for my family and kid’s sports teams. In general, though, I’m a performance nut and want all-around leading-edge performance so that my machines are well balanced and as powerful as they can be for the platform.

I’m looking to upgrade my system again but this time plan on sticking within my current Intel platform. What upgrades would you recommend in terms of best bang for the dollar? I’d rather not spend money on upgrading a component only to realize that in reality that component was fast enough and the money spent is being limited by something else in the machine.

A: This is the type of question we’re asked on a continual basis, Chris. We never mind answering because, frankly, our responses are as ever-changing as the technology itself. Looking at your current build, you are very much up to snuff in a lot of areas. In fact, we’d venture to say your machine is faster than many current mainstream home PCs.

Regardless, as your need-for-speed instincts have prompted you, there are ways to squeeze more performance out of your current system build. The first thing to consider is that you’re at or near the top end of the performance spectrum for the main system processor. That Core i7-950 and DDR3-1333 memory have enough horsepower that upgrading either will likely not offer as much upside performance as you could gain by tapping into other areas.

Take, for example, your storage subsystem. That WD Caviar Black 1TB hard drive is pretty peppy, relatively speaking, but it can’t hold a candle to the responsiveness and throughput of a fast SSD. We’d recommend putting that 1TB drive on a secondary SATA connection as bulk storage, and while you’re at it, grab another matching WD 1TB drive for a RAID 1. You can put all your critical files, such as your video footage, on the mirrored array for redundancy and then set up an SSD as your primary OS boot drive. We’d suggest going with something like an Intel X25-M Gen. 2 160GB SSD, OCZ Vertex Turbo 120GB, or Corsair 256GB SSD. Overall, the Intel and OCZ drives are the fastest, but any of today’s higher-end brand-name SSD will offer a significant performance boost in terms of boot times, application loading, and file transfers for your video editing and gaming applications.

The next area you want to look at specifically addresses your gaming and entertainment requirement. Although that GeForce GTX 285 is definitely very capable, the fact of the matter is that AMD’s ATI Radeon 5800 series is a lot faster. We’d suggest you take a look at the Radeon HD 5870, currently the fastest single-GPU card on the market, or the Radeon HD 5970, which is the current fastest dual-GPU card. We recommend these two cards with one caveat. Nvidia is rumored to have its next-generation GF100 GPU ready for action sometime in Q1 2010. So, in the coming months, there may even be more powerful options. Keep a close eye on the market.

Regardless, either of the Radeons is going to offer significantly higher frame rates, as well as allow higher resolutions at higher image quality settings over the GeForce GTX 285 you have.

J.T. asked: What are your feelings about having a large hard drive for your primary OS volume? I was thinking of installing Win7 and replacing my current 320GB primary drive with something larger: a 7,200rpm 750GB Seagate drive that I have. I have reservations about using the Seagate drive as the primary drive because I remember hearing something about large OS drives ruining computer performance and that the OS should always reside on the smallest partition in a system. What are your thoughts? Is it OK to have a large drive with an operating system installed on it, or should I just stick to the primary 320GB HD and use the 750GB drive as a backup?

A: There is no problem having a large OS volume in a modern computer. To give you an example, one of our rigs has two 1TB drives running in a RAID 1 configuration, partitioned into two 500GB volumes. One is for our OS and applications, and the other is for our drivers, installers, Outlook PST, other utilities, and Ghost image. Partitioning the drives in this way gives us the ability to restore the backup image in the event of a problem, and we have a repository for important files and installers.

When it was expensive to back up data and drives were slower and less reliable, people used to advocate for a small OS partition. But with today’s drives and operating systems, there’s no real disadvantage to having a large OS volume.

Riccardo asked: I am not a serious gamer, nor am I a serious overclocker, though I find it all fascinating stuff to say the least. First, here is my hardware description:

• 125W AMD Phenom II X4 965

• Asus M4A785TD-EVO

• 4GB Kingston DDR3-1333

• 500GB Seagate 7200.2

• Standard air cooling

Which leads me to my question. When in Windows 7, CPU-Z tells me the following:

• Core voltage: 0.912 to 0.928v

• Core speed: 803.6MHz

• Multiplier: 4X

• Bus speed: 200.9MHz

• HT Link: 2009.1MHz

The strange thing is that the CPU appears to correctly read its factory speed of 3.4GHz with a 17X multiplier at 1.31V only momentarily. The stranger thing still, while I write this email to you, I can see it constantly fluctuating between the minimum and its supposed correct state. Why is this? Is my CPU defective or somehow not set up correctly in the BIOS?

A: To put you at ease, Riccardo, you’re not looking at a defective CPU. It actually appears that everything in your system is working as it should. You are correct, the new 125-watt Phenom II 965 is built with a factory default clock speed of 3.4GHz based off a 17X multiplier that is driven with a 200MHz stock reference clock.

However, what you’re seeing in CPU-Z is a real-time reading of your processor’s clock speed, as it powers down into its low-power state. Dynamic clock gating and lower power consumption in AMD’s and Intel’s current desktop processors today are achieved by dropping the core multiplier of the chip, as well as its core voltage, when the chip is idle. This reduces power consumption dramatically. However, when a workload is pushed to the chip, such as the slight strain word processing might place on it in your email example, the chip scales its clock speed back up to meet system demands. The Phenom II has various low-power states but under heavy workloads will scale up to its full clock speed.

Your Phenom II X4 965 has faster rise and fall switching of its power states, so what you’re seeing in CPU-Z is perhaps even more confusing. As a test, try downloading our favorite processor scaling test, Cinebench 10. Invoke a run with it across all cores and watch what happens in CPU-Z while the test renders its workload. You’ll see that Phenom II pegged at 3.4GHz .

by Dave Altavilla and Marco Chiappetta,
the experts over at HotHardware.com.