Upgrade

[cruiser2]

Suff and anybody else.
I am considering upgrading my computer which is four years old. I will probably be able to use the tower case.
Which would be better, an Intel i5 or the AMD equivalent? I use it mainly for emails, surfing the web, edting photos and videos. Some gaming, but no high powered ones. May need a new motherboard and would like SSD to replace the existing hard drive. The change will be done by a local computer shop
Any comments or advice much appreciated.

[Workingman]

Intel i5s tend to beat AMD Fx processors in most tests, but so what?

For email, word processing, photo editing and so on you will notice no difference.... they can all work faster than we can. For videos and TV you will not notice much difference either - they both render efficiently when combined with a reasonable video card. If you were a serious gamer, like my son, you would go a lot higher and get a video card with its own powerful CPU.

SSD v HDD in a tower PC? Personally I wouldn't bother for your requirements. Sure, an SSD is quicker and more robust, in the mobile world, but in a fixed tower you get more storage/£ with an ordinary HDD.

Cruiser, if I was in your position I would go for the best motherboard to support an i5, and a lot of RAM and a good, but not gaming, video card. What they might be is a personal choice.

[Suff]

I'll reply when I get back to the UK. Busy now.

[Suff]

Hi Cruiser,

I would have said exactly the same thing about 6 months ago. Until the latest Xbox specs shipped. Effectively the latest Xbox will sport a newer variant of the AMD Richland chipset. This is a multi core low power chip with very high performance video graphics (for integrated graphics).

So I did a bit of looking around and found this review.

There are some key points here and it's very important to work through them.

In a straight line with a single thread, Intel has it all the way. This means that any program not optimised for processors which have more than one core, Intel wipes the floor with AMD.

However it becomes very interesting when you look at the other side of things. If you look carefully at the benchmark figures, the testers are having to use dedicated graphics cards to compare to the A10 onboard graphics. Also they did something else which was very interesting and is an area which I've been looking at for quite a while now. They found a media editing program which uses the graphics card processors (GPU processing), as well as the cpu. Result is that the AMD wipes the floor with the Intel chips when using this kind of program for video editing.

I've been looking at password crackers and also at bitcoin mining over the last year or so. I've noticed that AMD graphics cards, when being used as processors instead of playing games, are 4 times faster (or more), than their equivalent Nvidia counterparts.

As Windows now uses 3d graphics for the operating system and to display web pages, the faster your graphics the better. Note that in one test the A10 is being compared to a Nvidia GTX 680 which is a £300-£400 graphics card.

For my netbook I use an AMD E2 1800. For general GPU stuff it's a bit slow, but the graphics are better than all the Intel integrated. It plays DVD's very well. The A10 is way ahead.

Anyway, food for thought. I haven't bought one but I'm considering it for my media machines. Otherwise I'd say Inte core i5 with a decent AMD graphics card, possibly HD7000 or HD8000 series. Just be careful you have to read the performance specs as some 7000 cards are a lot faster than some 8000 budget.

For SSD drives there are two key figures.

SATA3. it is twice the throughput of SATA2
Iops. These are Input Output operations. Specifically you are looking for somewhere in the 80,000 4k read and 30,000 4k write area. Get something like that and you will be reasonably ok.

Also beware SSD benchmarks. Some are compressed and some are not.
Watch out for cheap crucial drives. Their write speed is very slow and their benchmarks are compressed.
Sandisk Extreme drives are good value but you need to upgrade the firmware as the shipped firmware had a bug . It was fixed 6 months ago but you never know if yours came off the shelf from the one with a bug. Very fast drives but you run a risk of needing to upgrade the firmware.

For windows you will need at least a 256gb SSD. This gives you space for OS and programs, space to reinstall (up to 20gb) and space for data. For instance, the OCZ Agility4 256GB SSD is a very good solid performer at a decent price. But you need to look around.

Just one other point to note for SSD’s. Their average life before the memory stops working is 5 years. This is on average usage. You have to disable defrag, both in AV suites and in windows automated tasks. Defrag significantly reduces drive life.

I hope that’s something to think over.

[cruiser2]

Suff & WM,
Thanking you for your replies. It will be November before I make my change so I have plenty of time to digest the information.
Will let you know what I buy.