What performance can I expect from my PC?

Question

Abit Socket 939 mobo (AV8) was AMD Athlon 64 processor with 1Gb of RAM.
Same mobo but changed processor to AMD Athon 64X2 and increased RAM to 2GB. Upgraded BIOS to accept dual core.
I don't see any change in performance. What can I reasonably expect for my efforts?

Answer 1

The first poster is correct, going from a single core Athlon to a dual-core X2 (or any dual core) won't make much difference unless there's also a jump in the processor speed rating. For example going from an Athlon 3500+ to the X2 4400+ or 4800+ would be noticeably faster.

Most games and programs still aren't written to take advantage of multiple cores, so you usually see the benefits when multitasking- decoding a DVD or compiling a program in one window while downloading or doing database searches, applying photoshop filters or other CPU-intensive tasks in another window.

Answer 2

Unless you where having memory issues before, I don't think doubling it will do much. But I would definately recommend turning "virtual memory" (the page file) off completely. I'm running my 1GB Xp system with no virtual memory without problems, and I'm a power user. This will make your computer faster when switching between programs and such.

Your computer will not be twice as fast by adding another core to the processor, but a few softwares can take advantage of the extra core. In normal usage you will mainly notice that your computer runs more smoothly when doing "lots of stuff" at the same time.

Answer 3

You won't see any difference when just doing light work on the computer (such as email, web sites and word processing) but you will see a huge difference if resource hungry applications such as games, multitasking and graphical editing programs.

Answer 4

this is a game pc,test it with hard game,there you will see the power of it,and in multitasking,test it....