Newbie: Help Interpreting Results and what to do?

[CG]

First off, the software is great! Easy to use and straight forward comps to benchmark systems, just what I was looking for. I want to better understand where my system can be improved before I spend the money. The results are in, but I'm unclear as to what to do.

I Ran the Performance Test software and my system falls way short of benchmark systems in the Disk test sequences, especially in the Disk-Sequential-Read; -Write; and -Random Seek + RW (by about 500% to 700%).

The CPUs are very similar and the hard drives are Western Digital. I compared specs on the Western website and the speed, buffer size and processing performance are the same. So, I'm thinking its not the hard drive. I was planning to upgrade the RAM to a dual kit DDR memory as an increase from the current single 512MG pc 2700 chip to a dual 1G (512x2) pc 3200 DDR. BTW, mother board is an Asus P5P800.

Would the RAM upgrade increase the Disk performance as much as 500% as well? If not, what else do you suggest?

Thanks in advance.

CG

P.S. Is there a way to post my performance results and get some input from those more informed than me to help design the best improvement bang for the buck

[David (PassMark)]

It would help if you posted the full specs of your current machine. CPU, video card, O/S and details of how you use your machine. e.g. 3D gaming or as a server.

In most cases extra RAM doesn't make a machine any faster. But the disk cache can be bigger when you have more RAM, so it can appear like you disk is quicker, some of the time, becuase data gets cached in RAM.

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David

[CG]

David,

The system is as follows:

-Asus p5p800 Motherboard (800MHz fsb)
-Pentium 4 3.0GHz (model 3; L2 Cache of 1024KB)
-RAM 512MG pc2700
-Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440
-Running on Windows XP

The machine is the household workhorse. Its used for gaming, and as a quasi-server storing our music and photo library as well as individual family member's work files (word, excel, powerpoint, etc). It acts as the hub for the home network of two other machines.

Hope this is what you needed, if you need more details please let me know.

TIA.

[David (PassMark)]

I would replace the graphics card first, maybe with a Radeon 9250 or a FX5200. Or a FX6800 if you have the budget.

I would then hold out for 12 months a then buy a whole new machine (Dual Core, 64bit, RAID, 2 x 10K RPM drives, 1GB RAM).

If you don't want to wait, then put some more RAM in. If you were looking for a bigger, more expensive, more time consuming upgrade have a look at RAID disk systems.

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David