New hardware for my desktop pc

The last upgrade of my desktop pc was done about 4 years ago, and i often thought about doing an upgrade for my desktop pc and change CPU,mainboard and or course RAM.

Introduction

Even though a new CPU would have a better performance we’re far away from those times where every 3-4 years the CPU frequncy would double and therefor a tremendous gain in performance woudl be the result. Now i had to answer myself the question if a gain in CPU speed of about 10-15% would be good enough to buy new hardware new CPU,. new mainboard and of course new RAM costing somewhere between 600-800 €. According to benchmark tests a recent CPU would mean an increase in processing speed of 30% at the maximum depending on the application. And a maximum of 30% resulting in costs of at least 600 € does this make sense?

The decision

The decision was amde for me by my familiy because they decided to get me a new  AMD Ryzen 1700X CPU, a new mainboard and new RAM as a gift, so i don’t have to think about wether this makes sense or not  😉

AMD has done a very good job with their fairly priced 8 core CPU and put a little bit of preasure on Intel since the AMD Ryzen is an alternative to an Intel 7700k CPU. But since the CPU frequency is very much the same like in my Xeon E3 1230 V3 the performance boost has to be done with the additional cores.

The Asus B350 Plus is a very solid maninboard which offers the main interfaces. Besides the 6 SATA interfaces the mainboard offers USB 3.1 connectors and you can install a m2 SSD which uses the PCI-lanes and should be alot more faster than a regular SSD connected via SATA.

Installing RAM i used 2 8 GB pieces from a 16 GB kit, so i can upgrade memory to 32 GB if i like.

Windows 10

After installing the mainboard and the new CPU the question was if Windows 10 would boot with the new system. After setting up the boot drive in the UEFI menu i just tried it, After a short message about new devices are made ready for use the Windows 10 system started. without new installation 😉

Now you can discuss the Windows so called performance index (which is not installed on Windwos 10) but comparing the results to those from the last upgrade you’ll notive quite a difference on CPU and RAM index. Also i don’t understand why the primary drive teh value is so low even though this drive is a SSD.

But of course startign Windows 10 without a clean install wasn’t done without any consequences 😉 my Windows installation wasn’t activated any more and i couldn’t activate it even using a Micrsoft account, but the later one isn’t used for local Windows 10 authentication.

Conclusion

With the exception of the Windows activation i’m very happy with the new systenm. The last time i gave AMD a chance was years. At that time you could buy an Intel  80386-DX CPU with 33 Mhz  or an  AMD for a little bit more money with  40 Mhz. Long time ago  😉

Because of the problems with the Windows activation i’ll do a clean install with a  USB-Stick and next time we’ll rake a look on the results with Lightroom or Premiere Pro.

ciao tuxoche