Upgrades

I'm upgrading my computer today. I've got two shiny new sticks of Corsair 400MHz ram for a total of 1 GB. I've also got a shiny new Seagate 7200 rpm 200GB Barracuda.

First things first, some baseline benchmarks. Right now I'm downloading PCMark 05 and 3DMark 05. I'll run both of them shortly to get some baseline results. Then I'll replace the RAM and run both tests again. Later I'll replace (read: put OS on Barracuda and use old drive for backup) the harddrive and run both tests. The RAM goes first because it's so much easier to change out than a HD + software. I'll post the results when I get them, so check back.

Baseline
Click on a link to see the results at FutureMark.

PCMark 05
Total Score: 2381 PCMarks
HDD - General Usage: 4.01 MB/s

3DMark 05
Total Score: 2559 3DMarks


+ First upgrade: RAM 512 MB -> 1GB
PCMark 05 test 1
Total Score: 2372 PCMarks (99.6% of baseline)
HDD - General Usage: 2.46 MB/s (61.4% of baseline)

It's really weird how the HD dropped so much! I should have run two tests of the baseline config to get an average. Since there is such a discrepancy, I'll run the test again to see if the HD score changes.

PCMark 05 test 2
Total Score: 2422 PCMarks (101.7% of baseline)
HDD - General Usage: 4.01 MB/s (100% of baseline)

This is more what I expected. Which is to say marginal improvements. These tests are mostly CPU and HD intensive and there isn't a dedicated RAM test. It was odd how the first HD test was so off. This HD test matched the first one exactly and I'm happy to keep it as final.

The largest areas of improvement from the baseline were Web Page Rendering (1.39 Pages/s -> 1.6) and Multithreaded Test 3 / Memory Latency - Random Access 16 MB (5.8 MAccesses/s -> 6.35)

3DMark 05
Total Score: 2573 3DMarks (100.5% of baseline)

This was also fairly expected. I didn't notice one way or the other when I ran the baseline for this test, but this time, I did notice something nice. There was zero significant HD access during the tests. Only during loading, after that, it was nice and quite. Quite is something I'm not used to with my noisy IBM. It'll be even quieter once the new Barracuda is in. There were no note-worthy improvements in any particular section over the baseline.

I'm going to be swapping the HD soon. My predictions are thus. PCMark scores will improve by 10% - 20% over baseline. 3DMark scores will not improve any significant amount.


+ Second Upgrade - HD IBM Deskstar(80GB) -> Seagate Barracuda(200GB)
After a long night backing up files and swapping hard drives, the Barracuda is installed. All in all it was painless. Though everytime I make a hardware change like that, I half expect something to pop when I power up again. Seagate has some software that works wonders, probably similar to Norton Ghost. It duplicated the entire system onto the new hard drive. The whole process was fairly transparent, i.e. no reinstalling. I'm keeping the old hard drive in the box because... why not. I'll also keep all the old files on it for at least a while to make sure everything came over okay and un-corrupted. After a while, I may even roll it into a Linux boot drive, that would be fun.

PCMark 05
Total Score: 2474 PCMarks (103.9% of baseline)
HDD - General Usage: 5.58 MB/s (139.1% of baseline)

Not much of an overall improvement here, but the HD speed is faster by about 40%. One stat I havn't kept track of that has seen a 100% improvment is noise. That old Deskstar was like a dishwasher! This Barracuda is whisper quite and it's sort of weird not geting aural feedback when the HD is working, I'm sure I'll get used to it.

3DMark 05
Total Score: 2575 3DMarks (100.6% of baseline)

No real change here, as expected.


Final Results


The gains are not extreme in these examples. The true benefits will appear in more real-world examples. I'll be able to run more programs with less HD access to swap between them. HD access will be faster and quieter. Even though 3DMark didn't show significant improvement, real games will benefit quite a bit. Load times between and during levels will be reduced by a lot. That alone could be worth the upgrade costs. The 200GB capacity will mean I can delete less, which was hardly a problem before. I was fine with the 80GB, I can't imagine I'll ever fill up 200GB with what I do. I'll check in later after I've put the drive through it's paces.