Help with PC Specs

[superFoolish]

I am very out of date with PC specifications, processors, etc.

I have had my current PC since Jan 2013, and it has the following specs:

Gigabyte GA-H77M-D3H motherboard
Intel Core i5-3330GHz processor
32Gb RAM.
1Tb HDD
500Gb SSD added last year when I upgraded to Win 10
GTX 1050 added last year for dual HDMI

I am using the PC for a software development project (Windows applications developed in Visual Studio), and I am finding it a little on the slow side for these purposes; it's taking over 10 seconds to compile and the user-interface that I am working on takes a few moments to refresh when I move things around or switch screens. 10 seconds might not sound like much, but when working on a project full-time, and sometimes compiling every minute or two, it can become tedious.

I don't want to spend money for the sake of it, but I have the budget available to buy a decent machine if needed. I do not live in the UK, but I can spend the equivalent of around £1k or bit more if necessary, just for the 'box' (I already have decent monitors).

I am not looking at building anything myself, or manually upgrading the machine; I have a deadline to meet, and I simply do not have the time. I am looking at something like a Dell, that I can take out of the box and use as-is.

For the money that I am looking at, I could get a Dell 'Alienware' PC with i5-8400 and 32Gb RAM, but I am not sure if that's going to give much of an improvement for my purposes. This appears to be the only PC they do that is supplied with 32Gb RAM).

I think the PC that I have now must have top-spec in 2013! Am I at the point of diminishing returns?

Any comments or suggestions welcome.

[ReformedCharacter]

I am very out of date with PC specifications, processors, etc.

I have had my current PC since Jan 2013, and it has the following specs:

Gigabyte GA-H77M-D3H motherboard
Intel Core i5-3330GHz processor
32Gb RAM.
1Tb HDD
500Gb SSD added last year when I upgraded to Win 10
GTX 1050 added last year for dual HDMI

I am using the PC for a software development project (Windows applications developed in Visual Studio), and I am finding it a little on the slow side for these purposes; it's taking over 10 seconds to compile and the user-interface that I am working on takes a few moments to refresh when I move things around or switch screens. 10 seconds might not sound like much, but when working on a project full-time, and sometimes compiling every minute or two, it can become tedious.

I don't want to spend money for the sake of it, but I have the budget available to buy a decent machine if needed. I do not live in the UK, but I can spend the equivalent of around £1k or bit more if necessary, just for the 'box' (I already have decent monitors).

I am not looking at building anything myself, or manually upgrading the machine; I have a deadline to meet, and I simply do not have the time. I am looking at something like a Dell, that I can take out of the box and use as-is.

For the money that I am looking at, I could get a Dell 'Alienware' PC with i5-8400 and 32Gb RAM, but I am not sure if that's going to give much of an improvement for my purposes. This appears to be the only PC they do that is supplied with 32Gb RAM).

I think the PC that I have now must have top-spec in 2013! Am I at the point of diminishing returns?

Any comments or suggestions welcome.

Only one comment SF, do you really need 32Gb RAM? I do some VS work too and I also find it slow and would have thought a faster CPU would be of more benefit than more RAM.

RC

[superFoolish]

Only one comment SF, do you really need 32Gb RAM? I do some VS work too and I also find it slow and would have thought a faster CPU would be of more benefit than more RAM.
RC

For some projects, I need to run a number of VMs simultaneously, and that is when 32Gb RAM is invaluable. However, I am not running VMs during the software development project that I am currently working on.

My current PC has 32Gb RAM, and I do use it; I couldn't go any lower than that. The cost of the RAM is not an issue for this project.

[Infrasonic]

Are both the CPU and GPU maxed out?
If not can you adjust the settings (hardware acceleration) to lean more on the GPU if it has the headroom?

The trend seems towards GPU with more cuda cores these days for intensive rendering/calculation software environments.

[AsleepInYorkshire]

I am very out of date with PC specifications, processors, etc.

I have had my current PC since Jan 2013, and it has the following specs:

Gigabyte GA-H77M-D3H motherboard
Intel Core i5-3330GHz processor
32Gb RAM.
1Tb HDD
500Gb SSD added last year when I upgraded to Win 10
GTX 1050 added last year for dual HDMI

For the money that I am looking at, I could get a Dell 'Alienware' PC with i5-8400 and 32Gb RAM, but I am not sure if that's going to give much of an improvement for my purposes. This appears to be the only PC they do that is supplied with 32Gb RAM).

I think the PC that I have now must have top-spec in 2013! Am I at the point of diminishing returns?

Any comments or suggestions welcome.

Would it help if you looked at the motherboard and the processor? I think you've ample RAM and the SSD will be efficient. But (and I'm not in any way a computer type) it may be the CPU and the motherboard could be the "slow" points in your set up. Also check the graphics card demands and ensure you have plenty of RAM attached to that.

AiY

[BobbyD]

Upgraded from an i3 4330 to an i5 8400 a ferw months ago for under half your budget, but I prefer to self build.

In terms of processor power you are getting a decent bump:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... Hz&id=1475

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... Hz&id=3097

Your actual location might affect pricing.

You can put together an i7 9700k, mobo, 2x16GB DDR4-3600 and a WD 1TB SSD for under £900 in parts. No trustworthy student/relative wanting to earn £100 to spend 20 minutes putting it all together?

[superFoolish]

Thanks for the feedback.

I suspected that the processor is pretty-much the only bottle-neck in my current setup.

With regards to having someone else upgrade it for me, I can’t have my PC out of action; if it was a matter of upgrading, I’d do it myself. The main risk is that something could go wrong during the upgrade process, leaving me without my main PC, hence the only option being purchasing a ready-to-run PC.

This is not a matter of saving money by doing an upgrade;I have the budget, and if a higher-spec PC would speed up the development process, I would buy it in a snap. I just don’t want to waste money if it’s not going to be faster.

Thanks again.

[BobbyD]

I would buy it in a snap. I just don’t want to waste money if it’s not going to be faster.

I think the i7 would be...

Hope something better suited to your needs than the i5 8400 laptop turns up at that price.

If it doesn't find a PC with less memory, ensure it is upgradeable, and add memory. Your existing PC continues to work unaltered so no risk of down time. Literally takes 30 seconds to add the memory.

Or you could spend the £100 on a case and PSU giving you two computers, and no need to decommission your original until entirely happy with replacement.

I can understand not wanting to spend that much money on such a seemingly modest improvement, on the other hand even a second saved on an operation run frequently enough will quickly return hours.

Don't forget to include time spent looking for the perfect off the shelf solution in your costs.

[Infrasonic]

Investigate the motherboard socket and see how feasible it is to swap out the CPU for something more powerful.

Secondhand CPU's from reliable sources can be had so if a suitable i7(K) could be found that might do the trick and would be overclockable (as long as your CPU cooling is up to scratch).

Cinebench is a good rendering test, do some reading up on CPU scores with it and run it to give you a baseline with the current setup.

[PrefInvestor]

Hi BobbyD, I am not familiar with Visual Studio myself, but I’m guessing its one of these processor, disk & memory intensive applications. To get a performance improvement you are likely going to need some or all of the following:-

a) As fast a processor as you can get (ideally one with lots of cpus/threads). From recent reviews Ryzen chips sound like they may be most cost effective ATM ?. PS Dont forget to get some decent cooling.
b) Lots of fast SSD storage, ideally NVMe SSDs if possible paired as a RAID 0 array. Ideally you want something that does NOT use SATA as the interface as this is a performance bottleneck.
c) Lots of memory, this is pretty cheap and easy to add. Personally I wouldn’t put less than 64GB in any new PC these days.
d) Unless your playing games I suspect that the graphics card is not much of a performance issue, so a run of the mill AMD or NVIDIA card should be just fine. So no need to spend a fortune on this component.
e) And don’t forget the power supply in all this, just make sure it is somewhat overspec’d to supply the power that’s needed. IMV I think that modular PSUs are best.

If you are running multiple virtual machines then a), b) and c) are all going to be key performance issues.

Given the age of your current system you are going to need to at minimum need to buy a new motherboard to do all this. And given what you said about not being able to take the existing PC out of action that means buying (or building) a new one.

Personally I would never buy a PC “off the shelf”, I would either use a specialist system builder like Chillblast (where you can spec what you want) OR buy a barebone system and buy and fit the other components yourself – which should help keep the costs down.

Can you build a decent system for your £1,000 budget ?. I suspect not, took a quick look on Chillblast and they want more than twice that sum for something that I’d want to buy.

Good luck with it anyway.

Pref

[BobGe]

I don't want to spend money for the sake of it, but I have the budget available to buy a decent machine if needed. I do not live in the UK, but I can spend the equivalent of around £1k or bit more if necessary, just for the 'box' (I already have decent monitors).
For the money that I am looking at, I could get a Dell 'Alienware' PC with i5-8400 and 32Gb RAM, but I am not sure if that's going to give much of an improvement for my purposes. This appears to be the only PC they do that is supplied with 32Gb RAM).

'Alienware' sounds like it's aimed at retail gaming, an area where marketing and enthusiam seems to dictate price. For anything like "i5-8400 and 32Gb RAM" circa £1k seems hugely overpriced. Half of that is a better budget. Some here have suggested to try upgrading the existing, but if you really need more performance it's significantly out of date so you'll not be able to achieve much. Newer PCs use faster interfaces and can take stuff like Optane memory.

Noting the prior post I expect some will question the budget put forward. Let's just say it's based on a little understanding.

[PrefInvestor]

Hi Again BobbyD, In your OP you didn’t say anything about what version of Visual Studio you were running or what you had done to try to optimise it’s performance. Much is written on these topics on the web and I saw one review that said that VS19 was significantly faster for certain tasks. Have you fully explored these avenues to addressing your performance problem ?.

If it does come down to needing a hardware upgrade have you explored the extent to which you could upgrade your current system ?. Ie Could you plug in a faster processor with more cores/threads and/or add more memory and what would these upgrades cost ?. These things should be cheaper and quicker to do and ought to result in some immediate performance improvement. I recognise that spending a substantial amount on such upgrades to an oldish system may seen undesirable, but given that your objective is simply a faster VS system at minimal cost and with no downtime it is surely a possible approach ?.

Have you profiled the usage of the software to know what’s limiting the performance ?. Eg is it cpu limited or memory limited or disk I/O limited ?. This should give you an idea if it is worthwhile trying a simple hardware upgrade such as those outlined above.

ATB

Pref

[Infrasonic]

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA ... -rev-10#ov

http://www.cpu-world.com/Sockets/Socket%201155%20(LGA1155).html

http://www.cpu-world.com/benchmarks/soc ... multi.html

The xeons aren't benchmarked above but are another possibilty.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Xeon/Inte ... %20v2.html

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

[fisher]

Have you investigated what your anti-virus software is doing while you're using visual studio? I used to use visual studio and I know that anti-virus software can start scanning the hundreds/thousands of new objects being created on each compile. After I left where I was working I know the remaining developers had to disable some of the company installed anti-virus scanning "features" and this then caused a lot of political problems internally. The software developers arguing that they couldn't do their work due to the massive extra load the anti-virus was putting on their computers.

It would be worth your while disconnecting your internet from your computer and trying visual studio with your anti-virus turned off to see if it is the bottleneck. If it is, then maybe you can configure the anti-virus to not scan so many objects or else try a different anti-virus.

[scotia]

I am very out of date with PC specifications, processors, etc.
I have had my current PC since Jan 2013, and it has the following specs:
Gigabyte GA-H77M-D3H motherboard
Intel Core i5-3330GHz processor
32Gb RAM.
1Tb HDD
500Gb SSD added last year when I upgraded to Win 10
GTX 1050 added last year for dual HDMI
I am using the PC for a software development project (Windows applications developed in Visual Studio), and I am finding it a little on the slow side for these purposes;

That seems a pretty good development system. As others have indicated, an update to an I7 processor in a similarly configured system should give you some increase in performance, but I suspect it will not provide a substantial gain. In my experience, the problem lies with the large integrated development systems like Visual Studio. As features are added to handle new developments (whether you want them or not) the packages become larger and less agile.

[PrincessB]

Hi there, some answers and some questions.

Gigabyte GA-H77M-D3H motherboard

My main downstairs machine (Using it now) has that motherboard and a simiar spec:
Xeon 1230v2 processor - 3.3 to 3.7GHz four cores with hyperthreading to appear as an octal core. Essentially an i7 without the option to overclock.
16Gb memory
1Tb SSD
750ti graphics card.

I think the PC that I have now must have top-spec in 2013! Am I at the point of diminishing returns?

Sort of, it depends on what performance boost you would consider acceptable for the outlay.

We live in a world where the easy performance gains have been made and these days computers get faster by 5-10% each year - One of the reasons I'm still happy with a system from 2013.

If you stack those 5-10% speed boosts from the various slightly improved components into a new system the gains stack up will add up to a more responsive machine that could be twice as fast as the one you have.

As I am some days late with a repsonse, my inital thought would be to buy a decent SSD with the capacity to hold all of your data and then backup the files you need to run Visual Studio.
Swap drives and install a fresh Windows 10 on the new drive (which can be downloaded and will work) a new install is going to feel very snappy.
You've then got the same machine, the same program to work with on the same files without the bloat that has accumulated on the old system over the years.

If it all goes horribly wrong, you've lost no data and by swapping back the original drive, you can continue to work.

With your £1000 budget, you should easily be able to exceed the performance of your current machine, but I doubt it will be 100% faster.

B.