Couple of upgrade questions

L

Hey,

I'm upgrading an old Vista machine to Win7 so I've now got the option of adding more ram to it. I reckon I'm going to upgrade it piecemeal the next while.

It's struck me though that I'm not sure whether I'm better off picking up another 4gb of DDR2 (so 8GB of RAM total @ 800mhz I think) or if I'd be better off spending the same cash on 4gb of DDR3 (so 4GB of RAM total @1333mhz). Any suggestions on which one would be better?

The other thing I'm wondering about is whether or not my old motherboard could benefit from a SSD.

Anyhow, any help would be appreciated.

Current spec
Gigabyte Triton 180 Black Aluminium Front (Without PSU)
Corsair Powersupply 550W Bulk, black, ATX/EPS, 120mm fan, 4xSATA, SLI
Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R, P35, Socket-775, ATX, DDR2/DDR3, GbLAN, DES, PCI-Ex16
Intel Core# 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz, Socket LGA775, 6MB, 1333Mhz BOXED w/fan
Corsair TWIN2X 6400 DDR2, 4096MB CL5, Kit w/two matched CM2X2048-6400 Dimm's
HIS Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3, PCI-Express 2.0, 2xDVI/HDMI/HDCP
Samsung SpinPoint F1 750GB SATA2 32MB 7200RPM
Sony NEC Optiarc DVD±RW burner AD-7200A, 20x, IDE, Black, bulk

Jonny7

theres shag all real-world performance between ddr2 and ddr3

also, unless you are using particularily heavy software, then there is not much diff between 4 and 8 gigs... 4 still being optimal

L

Fair enough, I was half sure myself about DDR2/DDR3 but it's been a few years since I've been looking at specs. I'll see how Win7 treats me and go from there on RAM.

How about an SSD? Is it worth the money to get one?

Deano12345

L wrote: »

Fair enough, I was half sure myself about DDR2/DDR3 but it's been a few years since I've been looking at specs. I'll see how Win7 treats me and go from there on RAM.

How about an SSD? Is it worth the money to get one?

Gonna stick my neck out here and say that SSD's will make the biggest difference to the general speed of a PC, out of any upgrade.

For a general PC, or even for someone like me (who does a lot of photo work) 4GB DDR3 is fine, you only need more for video editing IMO, that being said, 8GB is very cheap at the moment

Serephucus

An SSD is a great upgrade, especially for an older PC. Your motherboard supports SATA II 3Gb/s, so you're good to go on the speed side of things.

RE: RAM, the above is right. It's also worth mentioning that DDR2/DDR3 RAM boards are historically quite bitchy with what RAM they'll accept, hence why there wasn't a lot of them.

L

Cheers lads. I'll hold off on the RAM until I can figure out what will work and just grab the SSD.

Skerries

also factor in cost as DDR3 might be cheaper than older DDR2