Upgrading P.C's

Updated: 12/10/2006

The progress of technology in the PC industry never seems to falter, and there's always some new piece of kit that makes tomorrow's PCs infinitely better than today's.

Altough building a PC can be fun and help build your knowledge of how they work and how to fix, it is hard to compete against dell offers these days. If you are planning to build or buy a new PC, check out Dell first. Remember to avoid adding more harddrives and extra memory. You will save a fortune in adding these yourself later (at a fraction of what dell charge). But the base line systems are a great bargain.

In many cases, though, you don't need to buy a completely new computer to benefit from these advances: adding a new processor, graphics card or more memory can make a radical difference to an existing computer.

I must admit, it is hard to go past Dell machines these days. For either powerhouse usage - see XPS (laptop and desktop) or lower end internet usage - Dell make affordable machines for most needs. It woul dbe hard to build one, for the prices on offer. So check them out at www.dell.com (the XPS gen 2 laptop is very sweet - and expensive).

But how radical, exactly? Are we talking 10 per cent, 50 per cent or 200 per cent improvement? And how much is it going to cost? If it costs £500 for upgrades, wouldn't it be better to spend £700 or £800 for a completely new PC?

What you really need is a breakdown of the costs and likely benefits of upgrading, and that's just what we're going to give you here. In this three-part feature, we'll look at each of the main parts of a PC that are worth upgrading, and indicate the advantages and disadvantages of each.

And we'll go further than that: we'll quantify those advantages to indicate how much faster or how improved an upgraded PC will be in comparison with a PC platform from three years ago.

But let's start with the basics of upgrading the key components of your PC: the motherboard, processor, graphics card, memory and hard drive.

Motherboard and processor
The motherboard and processor are two major PC components that need to be considered together, since it's often the case that you can't upgrade the processor without fitting a new system board as well.

Although it may be possible to use a processor similar to the one already fitted, this is only likely to give you a marginal performance boost. Also, if the PC is over a year old, it may be difficult to buy a faster processor that will fit your existing system board.

If you're going to fit a new system board, your first choice is whether to buy one for an Intel Pentium 4 or for its main rival, AMD's Athlon XP.

For the fastest raw performance, you'd have to take the Pentium 4 route, as the 3GHz chip, with its 800MHz front-side bus (FSB), is faster than anything else currently on the market. The processor itself will cost you about £340, and a suitable system board from a manufacturer like Asus will add around £160 to this.

Fit both system board and processor, and the Sysmark rating will climb to something around 325, though this increase is partly due to other factors, such as the graphics card and memory. So, upgrading the processor in a typical mid-range three-year-old PC to a top-of-the-range chip today should provide a performance increase of around 460 per cent.

At an economy level, you could go for an AMD Athlon XP 2200+, which will give you a Sysmark rating of about 195, still nearly three times as fast as the Pentium III 800. It will cost you around £110 with a suitable system board.

What about the complexity of installing a new motherboard? It's certainly not as simple as fitting extra memory or even adding a hard drive, but the procedure isn't that complicated. If you feel uneasy about doing the job yourself, there are plenty of dealers, or perhaps the original supplier of your PC, who may undertake the work for you.

In outline, you open the case, remove all the expansion cards from their slots at the back of the system board, unplug all the cables connected to the board, undo the screws holding it to the case and remove it. Reverse the whole procedure to fit the new board.

If you're running Windows XP, you may need to reactivate the operating system with Microsoft, because of the changes to your PC's specification.

In replacing the motherboard in your PC you gain a lot more than compatibility with a modern processor. The new board should have the latest support chipset, offering faster access to memory and graphics card, all the new connection standards and connectors for updated equipment, such as fast Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives.

Replacing the system board and processor will typically cost you between £110 and £500 and is one of the most expensive combinations to update, the punch per pound is only fair, but it does affect every program you run on your PC.

This is an important consideration because unlike, say, a graphics card, where the main benefit is for games and other graphics applications, with a processor upgrade you'll see as much performance boost in your Internet browsing as you do in Half Life.

Graphics card
If your interests lie in using your PC for leisure, either to play games or for creative work such as digital photography or video editing, a very important component is the graphics card.

Graphics performance has increased dramatically in the past two or three years and a new graphics card can re-energise a tired PC, even with a comparatively slow main processor.

You'll see most of the benefit of a new graphics card on 3D applications, and almost exclusively with games. Although there's some improvement in 2D performance which you need for DVD playback and video, you're really paying your money for smoother games.

If you like to play the latest releases, you'll really notice the difference in two main areas. The frame rate - measured as frames per second (fps) or number of complete updates of the screen per second - drops as the complexity of a scene increases.

You're aiming to keep the frame rate above 30fps, even in the most complex stages of a game, which may mean it's topping well over 100fps when less is going on.

The other key area is picture quality, which breaks down into: the resolution of the picture (that is, the number of dots it contains); the number of polygons used to draw complex surfaces such as a human face; and the sophistication of textures used to simulate surfaces such as walls and floors.

Moving from a graphics card that was considered close to state-of-the-art three years ago - Nvidia's Geforce2 GTS - to a card occupying the top slot today - a Geforce FX5900 Ultra or ATI Radeon 9800 Pro - will double or triple frame rates. This results in 3Dmark 2001SE indexes moving from 2,800 on the Geforce2 GTS up to around 18,000 on either of the new cards.

But this kind of graphics technology doesn't come cheap. The Geforce FX5900 Ultra typically costs £400, while the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro come in only slightly cheaper at £380.

Even much cheaper cards, however, such as the Geforce FX5200 or Radeon 9000 Pro, still return performances of around 8,000 as measured by 3Dmark. In these cases you're paying around £70 for a new card, giving a much higher punch per pound.

As with most of the core components in a PC, the graphics adaptor can't be considered on its own. For one thing, it's dependent on the speed of the AGP bus. The AGP bus is the connection between the processor and the graphics adaptor and can be rated at 1x, 2x, 4x or 8x.

If you buy a new graphics adaptor for your PC, rated at 4x or 8x AGP, it will still only run at 1x or 2x, if that's all your motherboard can manage. The AGP bus will always run at the slowest rating in the system.

Fitting a new graphics card is straightforward and involves no more than unplugging the monitor from the old card's back panel, removing the retaining screw and lifting the old card out of its slot. Push the new one into place, refasten the screw, plug in the monitor and you're there - just a few minutes' work.

Memory
There are two distinct ways of upgrading the memory in your PC. You can simply add more to the existing complement by plugging in an extra memory module of the same type.

However, if you're upgrading your system board, you should go for new memory. The advantage of new memory is that it will have substantially higher bandwidth than you would find in a three-year-old PC. In other words, it will run faster.

The bandwidth of the memory in your PC is not just a function of the memory chips themselves, but also depends on the memory controller, which is part of a PC's chipset. In the same way, there have been improvements in processors, and new chipsets include improved memory controllers and increased speed for the memory bus.

Although it will work, there's no point in fitting memory with a higher bandwidth than is supported by the chipset on your system board - you won't see the extra performance of the memory.

A technique called double data rate (DDR) effectively doubles the amount of information that can be transferred to and from memory during each processor clock cycle. DDR memory is found in nearly all new PCs. You can take advantage of the improved performance in an existing PC by installing a new motherboard with an up-to-date chipset that supports DDR.

The memory in our test machine, 128MB of SD-Ram running at 133MHz, has a bandwidth of about 950Mbps, according to the Sisoft Sandra benchmark. Upgrade to 333MHz of PC2700 DDR memory and you're looking at a bandwidth of about 2,050Mbps, while 400MHz PC3200 DDR can produce up to 2,900Mbps.

Although memory prices have stopped falling at the rate they did last year, new memory is still a cheap upgrade. A 256MB module, probably the minimum size you should fit as an upgrade, will cost around £30 for a 333MHz stick and £35 for one which can run at 400MHz.

Hard drive
The main reason to upgrade your hard drive is not so much to improve performance, but to give yourself more storage room.

While there have certainly been speed improvements in the design of hard drives in the past three years, these generally won't give you the kind of overall performance boost that upgrading the processor or graphics card will.

The main performance improvements have been increased spindle speed, the rotational speed of the disk platters inside the drive and, recently, the move from parallel to serial connection. The latest SATA drives use smaller, neater cables and have a theoretical data transfer rate of 150Mbps.

The maximum throughput from drives with a parallel interface is 100Mbps, but three years ago you would be lucky to have had a drive with a throughput of more than 66Mbps fitted to your PC. Therefore, there is a potential performance increase of around 230 per cent.

With that in mind, if you're thinking of switching to a serial hard drive you'll need to fit a new motherboard with support for this standard.

Using Sisoft Sandra 2003 again, the 20GB Quantum Fireball P drive in our three-year-old test PC delivered 16.3Mbps, where an ATA100 device produced 23.3Mbps and a Serial ATA150 drive managed 29.5Mbps, not quite double the throughput.

The reason these figures are much lower than the theoretical maximums is that these measured figures are sustained transfer rates, where the headline figures above are peak numbers for so-called burst transfers.

Certain types of application gobble up hard drive space like there are no days left in the week. These include storing digital music, high-resolution digital photographic images and most especially digital video. Good-quality video needs about 80MB of storage per minute of programme, so an hour's worth could occupy 5GB.

If you're editing substantial sections of a video, storage requirements will be a lot higher, so you should think of buying a hard drive of 60GB or more for this kind of work.

Unlike upgrading your processor, when you add a hard drive to your system you don't have to remove your old one (unless you're switching from parallel to serial connections). A 60GB hard drive will cost you around £55, while a 160GB SATA device runs to about £150.

So far we've looked at upgrades that improve the performance or facilities offered by your PC. There are other things you might want to do for it, though, which come under the heading 'Extreme PC' or 'PC Moding'.

Without spending a fortune, and with the aid of just a pair of tin snips and a fluorescent tube, you too can have the PC equivalent of a '69 Chevy with a hemi-head and a set of 18in slicks.

The bells and whistles mentioned here cover three main areas of improvement to your computer: reducing heat, cutting noise and improving looks.

If you want to get the most out of your processor and its supporting hardware you may want to tweak the clock rates at which it runs. This is called overclocking and, while it may mean you get improved performance from standard components, it certainly means your PC will generate more heat.

Ultra cool
There's a whole raft of accessories designed to keep your PC running cool. They're particularly important for overclockers, as overheating is the main enemy of running a processor fast.

A standard heatsink or fan, generally known as a cooler, is fine for a processor run at its specified clock rate, but if you want to run it above this, it will overheat and possibly break down if no extra cooling is provided.

Fitting a specialist cooler, which can dissipate more heat than a standard one, brings the temperature back down and safeguards your overworked chip.

There are a number of different designs of cooling device, from fancy heatsinks made with copper vanes, to cunning designs involving high-performance fans.

With the right choice of heatsink and fan, you should be able to reduce the temperature of a processor by up to 15 degC. Prices on specialist coolers run from £25 up to more than £50.

Heatsinks are rated by the amount of heat they can dissipate, and fans by the amount of air they move. Fitting fans could hardly be simpler, since in most cases it means simply screwing them to the case or the heatsink.

Replacing the heatsink on a processor is a little more complicated, as the spring-clips that retain them can be awkward to remove.

One of the key factors when improving the cooling in a PC is to get the airflow right.

Since warm air naturally rises, it's best to suck in air at the bottom of the case and blow it out at the top, but the airflow from case fans and from those on processor and chipset are likely to be at right angles, so the total airflow picture can be complex.

Stealthy quiet
PCs may be useful tools, but in many cases they're far from quiet. The culprits are those same fans that help to cool hot processors, chipsets and graphics cards.

Fans are naturally noisy as their entire purpose is to move air around and the main ways to reduce noise are to slow them down or eliminate them entirely.

A couple of recent PC designs are completely fanless, but there's a performance hit in this approach which is often unacceptable. When you need the best of both worlds, the answer is to use larger fans and run them slower.

To move the same amount of air and make less noise, you simply use a fan with bigger blades to do the job. Suppliers such as The Overclocking Store and Overclockers UK can supply a wide variety of different fans, though not all PC cases come pre-drilled for the larger models.

As well as fitting larger, slower fans and introducing thermostats to existing fans to slow them down when things are running cool, you can fit acoustic foam on the inside of your PC's case.

This noise suppressor can be quite effective at reducing the overall noise produced by a PC and is very easy to fit. It's usually self-adhesive and all you need is a pair of scissors to trim it to size.

Custom looks
Let's face it, the main reason for modifying a PC is to make it different from the run-of-the-mill beige box. You can buy special cases made from plastic, aluminium or steel in a complete spectrum of different colours.

Try extremecase.com or theoverclockingstore.co.uk for a good selection.

There are even completely transparent, acrylic cases, though it has to be said these are not much good for radio frequency shielding. Custom cases range from around £40 up to £200.

If the idea of transferring all your PC's hardware into something new and more visually exciting doesn't appeal, you can modify your existing case with a pair of tin snips, some clear acrylic sheet and a few fluorescent lights.

If you're happy to drill new holes in your case, cut sections out of it and spray it in colours other than cream, there's little to stop you creating a PC that you can guarantee will be unique.

A browse around sites intended for overclockers or case modifiers reveals tools for adding transparent panels to the side of your PC's case and fitting lights inside it.

You can buy fans fitted with LEDs that flash when the blades rotate, cables that glow in ultraviolet light and UV tubes to make them do just that.

Lights inside your PC can either shine steadily or be activated by sound, in the same way as a hard drive or CD whirring into action. Prices vary, but a simple LED fan will cost about £10 and a kit to cut a window will set you back under £30, including the pre-cut acrylic and a nibbling tool.

There are bubble tubes using different coloured LEDs to provide a mock 1950s jukebox effect and even miniature water tanks to attach to a window in your PC's side panel, so you're looking at your PC's internals through the bubbles.

In the same way Californian roadsters were modded in the 1960s, right through to 2 Fast and 2 Furious, showing off the insides of your computer can become quite an obsession.

While it does little for either the performance or the functionality of your PC, it'll do a lot to impress more conventional PC owners.

Save money with updated drivers
There is a route you can take to upgrading your PC which involves no money at all. Most of the key hardware components in your PC have corresponding software drivers, which enable the operating system on your PC to work efficiently with them.

The software drivers are normally maintained by the manufacturers of the hardware and the first thing you should do, before investing in hardware upgrades, is check your drivers. The best places to go are the websites of the appropriate hardware manufacturer.

Most companies offer drivers in their support sections and it's a comparatively simple job to download the files and install them. Getting the latest drivers has the double benefit of ensuring the hardware is running as well as its makers intended and, possibly, removing unwanted 'features'.

Graphics cards are the most likely components to benefit from an update to their drivers.

Because of the complexity of graphics hardware and the wide variety of games that can be run on them, card manufacturers pay constant attention to their software drivers and frequently update them to squeeze the best possible performance out of the hardware.

If you upgrade your graphics card, still check for new drivers, as those in the box may be several months old.

Where to buy upgrade kit
These are the sites you should browse around for the components and equipment described in this feature.

While there are plenty of other suppliers, those listed here have good to excellent selections of upgrade components and offer competitive prices.

Many of the specialist overclocking and custom case sites include forumsand FAQs which offer plenty of extra, valuable information.

Other sites, like overclocking.comand extremeoverclocking.com provide reviews of new kit and advice on how to use it. Overclocking.com highlights individual enthusiasts' radical cooling projects.

How about utilising a 1959 Prestcold fridge as a cooling unit to run a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 at nearly 3GHz!

More to come:

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