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Upgrade 101 - Conclusion

Copyright ©, Myles White, 1999

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Well, here we are, back at the old stand. Our upgrading series is finished and what a ride it was! This week, it seemed appropriate to add a follow-up - looking at where we've been, why we went there, how much it cost, and, what we got for the money.

Our test bed, supplied by Grey-Tech Computers in Markham, Ontario (www.greytech.com), was worth about $1,150 at the time I got it, but there's no point going up there to look for it. We asked Grey-Tech's owner, Adil Sunderji, to assemble a mixture of newer and older parts to build a system that was representative of the lower end of the price scale.

It included an ATX-style case and power supply, Asus P3B-F motherboard with Intel 440BX chipset, 400 MHz Intel Celeron processor, 64 MB of PC-100 synchronous dynamic random access memory (SDRAM), a 1.2 MB hard drive, ATI Rage IIC graphics controller, SoundBlaster 128 PCI sound controller, a generic 24X CD-ROM drive, AOpen FM56-SM "56K" modem, floppy disk drive, and 15-inch Daytek monitor. I supplied the mouse, keyboard and network card installed in it along the way.

Let's restate this point. Upgrading - the act of adding or replacing components in a computer in order to increase its performance and/or abilities, to stretch its useful life before it needs replacing in order to keep up with new hardware, software, or your own sense of anticipation - only works as a strategy if you begin to do it early in the computer's life.

If you wait until all of its parts are no longer adequate to serve you satisfactorily, it will cost more to rebuild the system than to get a new one. That's simply a reality of how the business works - the markup on individual components is higher than on complete systems (the auto industry works the same way).

What we did

I started by replacing the 1.2 GB hard drive with something a little more spacious. Instead of adding a second drive to the system, I chose to set the smaller drive aside, replacing it with a 5400 RPM, 8.4 GB, Fujitsu Ultra DMA/66 drive at a cost of $179. This didn't add much to performance (except that we now had a very spacious dynamic swap drive for Windows to use). However, to illustrate the difference rotation speed makes, I later replaced the Fujitsu with a 7200 RPM, 10 GB, Maxtor 91024D4 (UDMA/33) drive. Although the transfer rate on the drive was slower, that didn't matter because the Intel 440BX chipset only supports UDMA/33 and not the newer "standard" of 66 MB/sec. So there was no remarkable difference in read speed between the two drives. The main noticeable difference here was in write speed - with the Maxtor clocking nearly double the rate achieved by the Fujitsu.

Our next task was to double the system's main memory, from 64 MB to 128. Memory prices are still fluctuating wildly in the GTA, but they've begun to fall. In October, a 64 MB dual inline memory module (DIMM) was nearly triple the price of last summer - well over $200. By December 1, the cost had dropped to $149 (and I anticipate it will be back to last summer's levels by the end of January or slightly later).

Again, the effect on the system's speed was slight, however, there were some small increments in memory read and write speeds and a small improvement in hard disk performance. But I know from previous experience that I'd now be able to run more applications without the system having to page memory out to the hard drive to make room for them. For example, instead of 5 MB remaining during the WinTune98 tests, there was now 75 MB of free overhead to play with. Among other things, I can anticipate seeing far fewer messages saying, "This program has performed an illegal operation," with "close" as the only option.

Start your engines!

We begin to see marked speed improvements when I replaced the older ATI graphics controller with the $209 Diamond Viper 770 using the system's accelerated graphics port (AGP). Aside from having faster access to the processor through the AGP slot, the Viper can also run at either AGP 2X (the speed we have to use) or at AGP 4X for newer motherboards with Intel's i820 chipset or VIA's Apollo Pro 133A.

The Viper 770 comes with 32 MB of SDRAM instead of the 4 MB on the ATI board. Among other things, this allowed me to run some Direct 3D tests at higher resolution and colour values than the ATI permitted (1024 by 768 at 65,535 colours instead of 640 by 480 at 256 colours). The Viper also boasts good 3D acceleration (using the nVidia Riva TNT2 chipset) and Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) hardware decoding.

Overall, the Viper completed WinTune 98's video tests 75 per cent faster than the ATI board. The Open GL tests were over 877 percent faster, for example, and Direct 3D at the higher resolution and bit depth was 466 per cent faster. But one operation was actually slower - moving blocks of device independent bitmaps around on screen (essentially a 2-D operation). To bring it a little closer to earth, the cards in Freecell disappeared more slowly after a successful game, but they peeled off and vanished more quickly when I won at Solitaire.

Along the way in our series, I described attaching external peripherals, cleaning a mouse, replacing a sound card, replacing the CD-ROM with a DVD-ROM drive (about $139), and setting up a home network. While each of these tasks can make your computing experience fuller and more satisfying, none of them particularly adds (or subtracts) from system performance, if by the term you rate only speed. Nevertheless, they're all legitimate upgrade or maintenance tasks that can extend the useful life of your computer.

Our next major upgrade was to replace the 400 MHz Celeron processor with something a substantially more robust. All Celeron processors, regardless of their internal speed rating (400, 466, 500 MHz for example), run at multiples of the speed of the front-side bus - the data pathway that connects the processor to the system's main memory. The front-side bus speed of a Celeron-based system is 66 MHz.

Overdrive

However, I chose a motherboard with Intel's 440BX chipset primarily because it can change the front-side bus speed. I swapped the 400 MHz Celeron out and replaced it with a 500 MHz Pentium III (the older Katmai version with 512 KB of level 2 cache as a separate module within the processor cartridge, running at half the speed of the processor). I could also have chosen one of the newer "Coppermine" Pentium III processors at up to 700 MHz - but the Coppermines, although available to some major system manufacturers, aren't available in quantity for local system assemblers yet (or at least not at a price that made Adil willing to supply one for me to play with). The retail price for the 500 MHz Katmai PIII on December 1 was $359.

This upgrade produced the most dramatic results. When the front-side bus woke up to 100 MHz, the PC-100 memory on board also woke up, so there was an increase in memory read, write, and copy speed (nearly 40 per cent in the case of read speed). Hard drive read and write speed went up 26 and 39 per cent respectively. Overall video performance went up another 40 per cent. Raw processing speed, including CPU integer and floating point operations, went up by about 25 per cent each.

So, we began with a roughly $1,150 system boasting fairly mediocre performance. Along the way, not counting the sound card, DVD drive, or networking, we added parts totaling another $896. Before you blanch at the cost, however, keep in mind that under normal circumstances it might be strung out over three or four years, that faster versions of the parts we used will be available in that period for about the same price, and that I haven't allowed for recovering some of the costs by selling off the parts we replaced - or using them as the basis of a second computer. All told, I think it's a reasonable investment to make to get an overall performance increase on a computer of about 37 per cent - particularly if it's one you're going to use every day.

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