What's the weak link in my PC build?

funinacup

Hi all,

Would love some advice on why my system is slow to load stuff, like Chrome browser, games etc. It's actually good at running games (only really played PubG and The Sims on it) and once it's up and running, it takes most stuff in its stride, but struggling with multiple applications sometimes and is always slow to open things.

It's just been formatted and has a fresh Windows 10 install (was using 7 ultimate before and performed exactly the same).

Here's the spec:

- CPU: AMD A8-5500 3.20GHz Quad Core APU
- Motherboard: Asrock FM2A55M-DGS (Socket FM2)
- RAM: Patriot Viper 3 "Red Venom" 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit
- 500w PSU
- Toshiba Hybrid 500gb SSD - 5400rpm
- GPU: Asus R7 240 4GB

Any help appreciated!
Thanks
Michael

EndlessWaves

'Slow' is always a tricky subject without context. If it's your main computer and you don't use other machines regularly then there's a good chance there's a problem somewhere, but if you're often using faster machines it may be that you need an upgrade.

That Piledriver CPU design was never a very successful but it was the single module designs suffered the most. The dual module designs like yours seemed to keep up at the time though.

Using a hard drive rather than an SSD won't produce the fastest opening times, but the hybrid makes up some of that even if it's not comparable to an SSD for general responsiveness. That's probably a good starting candidate as it's cheaper than a new CPU, Motherboard and Memory.

8GB of memory may be causing the occasional struggling with multiple applications (depending on the memory usage of those apps) but it wouldn't cause the rest of the symptoms.

funinacup

To be honest I think I just want to upgrade it. I use a macbook air from 2013 as my daily work computer and its definitely faster to respond. I do think that when I first built the PC it was  quicker, but the drive is now a lot older so I think it would be wise to throw an SSD in there to speed things up.

Should I be looking to use one just for booting up, and running applications from another  or would a 1tb drive do everything I need?

I'd love to go down the NVME route but motherboard doesn't support that so it's on the back burner for now.

Thanks again
Michael

EndlessWaves

A single drive is fine, I've never heard of two bringing any benefits

gvh

Reinstall on an ssd and keeping the spinning rust for storage only. That's the weak point.

DavidG1

The system must be a few years old and is starting to show its age. Windows 10 requires more resources than windows 7, The AMD A8 was never a particularly fast processor and the SSHD although better than a standard mechanical drive will never perform as well as an SSD
NVme is much faster than an SSD but in practice will only knock off 1 or 2 seconds off boot times
TBH the whole system needs replacing. The motherboard only supports up to an Athlon II x4 or an AMD A10 which probably wouldn't give a significant speed increase.
I would agree you could replace the SSHD with an SSD - they are now dropping to a sensible price and see if that speeds the system up to an acceptable level. If you can afford a 1TB SSD go for that, it makes things a little simpler, othwerwise if you have a smaller (say 250GB) SSD boot and secondary HDD mass storage you have to change the library locations to the HDD and have to be keeping an eye on how much space is being used on the SSD

EndlessWaves

SSD is a technology for how a drive stores data and works physically. NVMe is a protocol for transferring data, it's an alternative to AHCI.

It doesn't make any sense to say NVMe is much faster than an SSD. Any NVMe device you're likely to buy is an SSD.


Strictly speaking it's not NVMe providing the ability to use faster flash at all (or only a minor part). The shift to the NVMe protocol largely coincided with the shift to connecting drives via PCI-Express rather than SATA, which is responsible for most of the speed difference. There were some PCI-E AHCI drives in the first couple of years which were as fast as the NVMe ones.

It just proved less confusing to market the drives as NVMe rather than PCI-E.

DavidG1

Actually it was a typo, I meant SATA

funinacup

Thanks all. A Samsung 860 Evo SSD showed up today so will install that on Friday and report back

funinacup

Update:

Computer is now a powerhouse! Well, relatively speaking. Now noticing shortfalls of the GPU, RAM etc but I'm putting that down to upgrade-itis!