On Sun, 21 Apr 2013, David Zuccaro <david.zuccaro@optusnet.com.au> wrote:
I'd like to get a new desktop computer system; I'm currently using a 1.8 GHz C2D with 2 GB of memory with debian squeeze. It doesn't seem up to the job any more; HD movies are choppy; iceweasel is sluggish.
For the "choppy" movies, what player are you using? If you use mplayer then run it from the command-line and it'll tell you if the CPU is too slow. One of my systems has an Intel E4600 CPU (2.4GHz dual core) and it plays 1080p movies poorly (drops frames and gives mplayer warnings). Sometimes I use avconv to scale down movies before watching them. Movie playing isn't that important to me so scaling a movie file to 720p and then scaling it up again at play back time while theoretically losing quality in practice doesn't impact my enjoyment. Anyway that system doesn't have the fastest graphics card, my main purchase criteria were supporting a 27" monitor at full resolution (2560*1440 rules out lots of graphics cards) and having no fan. If video performance was important to me I'd investigate a new video card before a new system. When iceweasel performs poorly how much swap is in use and is the hard drive light on a lot? Iceweasel performance is probably limited by RAM use - although it's apparently not as bad as Chromium. How much RAM does your system support? Many Intel systems have crappy chipsets that limit you to 4GB physical address space of which ~700MB is reserved for IO giving a maximum of 3.3GB of usable RAM. Even if you have one of those chipsets designed to be obsolete then you will still be able to improve performance a lot by upgrading the RAM. I've got a bunch of systems with 3.3G of RAM which perform quite nicely. But 8G will be better if you can do it (and RAM is cheap nowadays). SSD makes a huge difference for IO performance. Most reports about reliability make Intel look good. Intel won't necessarily be the best but they have a good enough history that you probably won't regret buying one. I've got a bunch of Intel SSDs in production and they are working really well - not as fast as I hoped and they have some specific bad corner cases for writing but for reading they do really well. Put swap on your SSD. An SSD is not at all like a USB flash device. Swap on a USB flash device will kill it quickly but Intel SSDs and other serious devices are designed for write-back caching on ZFS and other uses that are very write intensive. They will survive any reasonable swap use. That said you should get enough RAM that you aren't swapping a lot anyway, even on SSD paging hurts performance.
I use my computer system for typical desktop reasons:
Gnome Internet browsing Evolution mail client amarok Watching movies Basic image processing with gimp.
I'm thinking of getting something along the lines of:
i7 3.4 GHz Graphics card.
If you are doing software decoding of high resolution video then even that might not satisfy you. When a 2.4GHz CPU has problems with 1080p you can expect that the next step up in resolution could give problems for a 3.4GHz CPU. As it seems that your only CPU intensive task is playing movies you should make the graphics card a priority. In fact you might want to start by putting a new graphics card in your current system before you even buy a new system (PCIe cards work in all modern systems).
4GB DDR3
Don't upgrade to a system with only 4GB. While 4GB will give you a significant benefit it's not enough to be part of an upgrade from your current system. If 4GB of RAM will do the job then keep your current system.
2 TB HD
Upgrading hard drives is a major PITA. So when you buy a drive you should buy the biggest that isn't really expensive to delay your next purchase. 4TB disks are unreasonably expensive but 3TB disks aren't much more expensive than 2TB disks. Get 3TB. Disks die on occasion. Get 2*3TB disks in a RAID-1 for bulk storage. Use a SSD for swap, root, /home, and anything else that's not really big and for which performance matters. A 120G SSD should cover all that. A 3TB RAID-1 array has plenty of space for a cron job to backup the 120G SSD. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/