Is it worth upgading from my q6600 setup

shamoney

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I have been doing Hd editing on my system but its so damn slow... specs are

Q6600 3Ghz may higher with better cooler
2gb ddr2 800mhz ram
ati x1300 graphics card
asus p5k premium
arctic freezer cooler
500 gb wesrtern digital 7200rpm
550 psu

at the moment am broke just cant afford i7 system...any suggestion on what i can change would be highly appreciate. i mostly use Adobe CS5
 
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I don't know much about the subject, but scratch disks and other hard drive based subjects tend to get mentioned so it might be an idea to list which hard drives you're using as well.
 
Is the scratch disk a dedicated disk by itself, or a partition?
 
Its a dedicated disk, no partion but I got like 200gb free. Is it a good idea to partition the hard drive and will see any performance improvements
 
Its a dedicated disk, no partion but I got like 200gb free. Is it a good idea to partition the hard drive and will see any performance improvements

Have you set the size of your scratch disk accordingly in Adobe?
 
I don't know how to set the size of scratch disk, I'll just Google it n hope for improvement cheers

What other part can I improve?
 
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I don't know how to set the size of scratch disk, I'll just Google it n hope for improvement cheers

Should be similar to:

To set the scratch disk:

  1. Choose Edit > Preferences > Performance.
  2. Select the Active? box for each hard disk you want to contain a scratch disk.

    Note: Unless you have a drive that has considerable space open, and is defragmented regularly, choose more than one drive, if one or more is available.
  3. Click OK.
  4. Restart Photoshop.
Courtesy of: Optimize Photoshop performance | CS3 | XP, Vista


You can also consider upgrading your RAM to 4GB if the OS is 64bit.
 
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I have been doing Hd editing on my system but its so damn slow... specs are

Q6600 3Ghz may higher with better cooler
2gb ddr2 800mhz ram
ati x1300 graphics card
asus p5k premium
arctic freezer cooler
500 gb wesrtern digital 7200rpm
550 psu

at the moment am broke just cant afford i7 system...any suggestion on what i can change would be highly appreciate. i mostly use Adobe CS5

I run a system similar to yours.

q6600 at stock speed
8GB (4x2Gb ddr 2 800mhz)
Ati 2600xt

Based on what you have I would add extra ram and a better video card. I currently have 8GB Ram running with an Ati 2600xt and after upgrading from 2GB I noticed a big difference. I am on Windows 7 64 bit and its a hell of a lot quicker than the old Vista 32 was. If you are encoding HD Video check that the software you are using supports multiple threads or else your quad core cpu is going to waste!

I have an Ati 3850 im going to put in the system next week to see if it make any difference to Video/Photo editing over what I currently have. If it does I will let you know
 
Thanks for the help guys. I've been doing research for past days, for the gpu, a lot of people are suggesting nvidia with about 100 cuda core..i don't know about the ati cards though. so I've decided to go for either gt240/gt430/9800gt..they are cheap on ebay and use less power as well.
For RAM i've looked around but nothing cheap. Anyone know where i can get great deals on ddr2 ram?
 
Thanks for the help guys. I've been doing research for past days, for the gpu, a lot of people are suggesting nvidia with about 100 cuda core..i don't know about the ati cards though. so I've decided to go for either gt240/gt430/9800gt..they are cheap on ebay and use less power as well.
For RAM i've looked around but nothing cheap. Anyone know where i can get great deals on ddr2 ram?

I'd check ebuyer and Novatech for the ram.
 
I'd check ebuyer and Novatech for the ram.

I've just upgraded from Q6600 to a Core i5 760
Q6600 was a great machine and to be honest i didn't really see a great improvement in the I5 760. I've overclocked the I5 to 4ghz with 8gb ram but the best upgrade for me was the SSD. Wished i had tried in the Q6600 first.

As someone has already mentioned, More memory really helps on the x64 platform.
 

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