General Gaming Article |
- Computer Upgrade Guide
- Microsoft's Windows Insider Program for Windows 10 Hits 1 Million Registrants
- Newegg Daily Deals: Intel Core i5 4570 Haswell, AMD FX-8320E Vishera, and More!
- Ryse: Son of Rome Lands on PC Supporting 4K, Gets Panned for Repetitive Gameplay
- Oops! Dropbox Bug in Selective Sync Inadvertently Deletes Files
- AMD Rumored to Refresh Never Settle Game Bundle
- Samsung Supercharges Wi-Fi, Develops Standard That's 5X Faster
- Zeiss VR One is a $99 Smartphone-powered VR Headset
- Effort to Port Minecraft to Windows Phone Already Underway
- Surface Hub App Delivers Pen Customization to Surface Pro 3 Users
| Posted: 13 Oct 2014 03:11 PM PDT Avoid the pitfalls and upgrade your computer like a proBuilding a new PC is a relatively easy task—you pick your budget and build around it. It's not the same with upgrading a computer. No, upgrading an older computer can be as dangerous as dancing Footloose-style through a minefield. Should you really put $500 into this machine, or just buy a new one? Will that new CPU really be faster than your old one in the real world? Are you CPU-limited or GPU-limited? To help give you more insight on how to best upgrade a PC that is starting to show its age, follow along as we take three real-world boxes and walk you through the steps and decisions that we make as we drag each machine back to the future through smart upgrades. While our upgrade decisions may not be the same ones you would make, we hope that we can shed some light on our thought process for each component, and help you answer the eternal question of: "What should I upgrade?"
Practical PC upgrading adviceThere's really two primary reasons to upgrade. The first is because you can—and believe us, we've upgraded just because "we could" plenty of times. Second, because you need to. How you define "need to" is very much a personal preference—there's no way to put a hard number on it. You can't say, "If I get a 5.11 in BenchMarkMark, I need to upgrade." No, you need to determine your upgrade needs using everyday metrics like, "I will literally throw this PC through a window if this encode takes any longer," or "I have literally aged a year watching my PC boot." And then there's the oldie: "My K/D at Call of Battlefield 5 is horrible because my graphics card is too slow." Whether or not any of these pain points apply to you, only you can decide. Also, since this article covers very specific upgrades to certain components, we thought we'd begin with some broad tips that are universally applicable when doing the upgrade dance. Don't fix what's not brokenOne of the easiest mistakes to make with any upgrade plan is to upgrade the wrong component. The best example is someone who decides that his or her PC is "slow," so they need to add RAM and take it from 8GB to 16GB, or even 16GB to 32GB. While there are cases where adding more RAM or higher-clocked RAM will indeed help, the vast majority of applications and games are pretty happy with 8GB. The other classic trap is deciding that a CPU with more cores is needed because the machine is "slow" in games. The truth is, the vast majority of games are coded with no more than four cores in mind. Some newer games, such as Battlefield 4, do indeed run better with Hyper-Threading on a quad-core or a six-core or more processor (in some maps) but most games simply don't need that many cores. The lesson here is that there's a lot of context to every upgrade, so don't just upgrade your CPU willy-nilly on a hunch. Sometimes, in fact, the biggest upgrade you can make is not to upgrade. CPU-boundYou often hear the term "CPU-bound," but not everyone understands the nuances to it. For the most part, you can think of something being CPU-bound when the CPU is causing a performance bottleneck. But what exactly is it about the CPU that is holding you back? Is it core or thread count? Clock speeds, or even microarchitecture efficiency? You'll need to answer these questions before you make any CPU upgrade. When the term is used in association with gaming, "CPU-bound" usually indicates there is a drastic mismatch in GPU power and CPU power. This would be evident from, say, running a GeForce Titan in a system with a Pentium 4. Or say, running a Core i7-4960X with a GeForce 8800GT. These are extreme cases, but certainly, pairing a GeForce Titan or Radeon 290X with a low-end dual-core CPU will mean you would not see the most performance out of your GPU as you could with a more efficient quad-core or more CPU. That's because the GPU depends on the CPU to send it tasks. So, in a CPU-bound scenario, the GPU is waiting around twiddling its thumbs most of the time, since the CPU can't keep up with it.
One of the trickier upgrades is the original LGA1366 Core i7 chips. Do you upgrade the chip, overclock it, or just dump it? GPU-boundThe situation can be reversed, too. You can indeed get GPU-bound systems by running older or entry-level graphics with a hopped-up CPU. An example could be a Haswell Core i7-4770K overclocked to 4.5GHz paired with say, an entry-level GeForce GTX 750. You will certainly get the best frame rate out of the GPU possible, but you probably did not need the overclocked Haswell to do it. You could have kept that entry-level GPU well-fed with instructions using a cheaper Core i5-4670K or AMD FX part. Still, the rule of thumb with a gaming machine is to invest more in the GPU than the CPU. If we had to make up a ratio though, we'd say your CPU can cost half that of your GPU. A $500 GPU would be good with a $250 CPU and a $300 GPU would probably be OK with a $150–$170 CPU. You can ignore the GPU sometimesKeep in mind, this GPU/CPU relationship is in reference to gaming performance. When it comes to application performance, the careful balance between the two doesn't need to be respected as much, or even at all. For a system that's primarily made for encoding video, photo editing, or other CPU-intensive tasks, you'll generally want as fast a CPU as possible on all fronts. That means a CPU with high clocks, efficient microarchitecture, and as many cores and threads possible will net you the most performance. In fact, in many cases, you can get away with integrated graphics and ignore discrete graphics completely. We don't recommend that approach, though, since GPUs are increasingly becoming important for encoding and even photo editing, and you rarely need to spend into the stratosphere to get great performance. Oftentimes, in fact, older cards will work with applications such as Premiere Pro or Photoshop, while the latest may not, due to drivers and app support from Adobe.
Core 2 Quad boxA small Form Factor, Light-Gaming Rig before SFF was popular This small box has outlived its glory days, but with a modest injection of capital and a few targeted upgrades, we'll whip it back into shape in no time. It won't be able to handle 4K gaming, but it'll be faster than greased lightning and more than capable of 1080p frag-fests. This particular PC could have very easily resided on the desktop of any Maximum PC staffer or reader back in the year 2009. We say that because this is, or was, actually a pretty Kick Ass machine in the day. It was actually a bit ahead of its time, thanks to its combination of benchmark-busting horsepower and small, space-saving dimensions. This mini-rig was probably used for light gaming and content creation, with its powerful CPU and mid-tier GPU. As far as our business here goes, its diminutive size creates some interesting upgrade challenges. Specifications
It's built around a Silverstone SG03 mini-tower, which is much shorter and more compact than the SFF boxes we use nowadays. For example, it can only hold about nine inches of GPU, and puts the PSU directly above the CPU region, mandating either a stock cooler or a low-profile job. So, either way, overclocking is very much out of the question. Water-cooling is also a non-starter, due to the lack of space for a radiator either behind the CPU area or on the floor of the chassis. In terms of specs, this system isn't too shabby, as it's rocking an LGA 775 motherboard with a top-shelf Core 2 Quad "Extreme" CPU and an upper-midrange GPU. We'd say it's the almost exact equivalent of a $2,000 SFF gaming rig today. The CPU is a 65nm Kentsfield Core 2 Quad Extreme QX6800, which at the time of its launch was ludicrously expensive and the highest-clocked quad-core CPU available for the Core 2 platform at 2.93GHz. The CPU is plugged into an Asus P5N7A-VM motherboard, which is a microATX model that sports an nForce 730i chipset, supports up to 16GB of RAM, and has one PCIe x1 slot in addition to two PCI slots, and one x16 PCI Express slot. GPU duties are handled by the venerable GeForce 9800 GT, and it's also packing 4GB of DDR2 memory, as well as a 500GB 7,200rpm Western Digital hard drive. Its OS is Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit. Lets dig inThe first question that crossed our minds when considering this particular machine's fate was, "Upgrade certain parts, or go whole-hog with a new motherboard/CPU/RAM?" Sure, this is Maximum PC, and it would be easy to just start over. But that's not really an upgrade; that's more like open-heart surgery. Besides, where's the challenge in that? Anyone can put together a new system, so we decided to buckle down, cinch up our wallets, and go part-by-part. Starting with the motherboard, CPU, and RAM, we decided to leave those as they were. For Intel at the time, this CPU was as good as it gets, and the only way to upgrade using the same motherboard and chipset is to move to a Yorkfield quad-core CPU. That's a risky upgrade, though, for two reasons. First, not all of those 45nm chips worked in Nvidia's nForce chipset, and second, benchmarks show mostly single-digit percent performance increases over Kentsfield. So, you'd have to be crazy to attempt this upgrade. We also deemed its 4GB of DDR2 to be satisfactory, since we're running a 32-bit OS and anything over 4GB can't be seen by it. If we were running a 64-bit OS, we'd upgrade to 8GB as a baseline amount of memory, though. We're not happy about the motherboard's SATA 3Gb/s ports, and the lack of a x2 PCIe slot is a problem, but SATA 3Gb/s is fast enough to handle any late-model hard drive, or an SSD upgrade. Another problem area is its bounty of 12 USB 2.0 ports. We appreciate the high number of ports, but USB 2.0 just plain sucks, so we added a PCIe USB 3.0 adapter, which gave us four SuperSpeed ports on the back of the chassis. One area ripe for upgrade is the GPU, because a GeForce 9800 GT is simply weak sauce these days. It was actually a rebadge of the 8800 GT when it arrived in 2009. This GPU was actually considered to be the low-end of the GeForce family when it arrived, as there were two models above it in the product stack—the 9800 GTX and the dual-GPU 9800 GX2. This single-slot GPU was only moderately powered at the time and features 112 shader processors clocked at 1,500MHz, and 512MB of GDDR3 clocked at 1.5GHz on a 256-bit memory bus. Since this system has limited space and only a single six-pin PCIe connector, we decided to upgrade the GPU to the Sapphire Radeon R7 265, which is our choice for the best $150 GPU. Unfortunately, the AMD card did not get along at all with our Nvidia chipset, so we ditched it in favor of the highly clocked and whisper-quiet EVGA GTX 750 Ti, which costs $159. This will not only deliver DX11 gaming at the highest settings at 1080p, but will also significantly lower the sound profile of the system, since this card is as quiet as a mouse breaking wind. Another must-upgrade part was the 500GB WD hard drive. As we wrote elsewhere, an SSD is a must-have in any modern PC, and we always figured it could make an aging system feel like new again, so this was our chance to try it in the real world. Though we wanted to upgrade to a 120GB Samsung 840 EVO, we couldn't get our hands on one, so we settled for a larger and admittedly extravagant OCZ Vertex 460 240GB for $160. We decided to leave the OS as-is. Despite all the smack talk it received, Windows Vista SP2 was just fine.
Real-World ResultsSince we upgraded the GPU and storage subsystem, we'll start with those results first. With the SSD humming along, our boot time was sliced from 1:27 to 1:00 flat, which is still a bit sluggish but doesn't tell the whole story. Windows Vista felt instantly "snappy," thanks to the SSD's lightning-fast seek times. Everything felt fast and responsive, so though we didn't get a sub-20-second boot time like we thought we would, we still gained a very noticeable increase in day-to-day use of the machine. For the record, we blame the slow boot time on the motherboard or something with this install of Vista, but this is still an upgrade we'd recommend to anyone in a similar situation. Interestingly, we also saw a boost in one of our encoding benchmarks, which could be due to the disk I/O, as well. For example, Sticth.Efx 2.0 dropped from 41 minutes to 36 minutes, which is phenomenal. Stitch.Efx creates in excess of 20,000 files, which will put a drag on a 500GB hard drive. Our gaming performance exploded, though, going from 11fps in Heaven 4.0 to 42fps. In Batman: Arkham Origins, we went from a non-playable 22 fps to a smooth 56fps, so anyone who thinks you need a modern CPU for good gaming performance is mistaken (at least for some games); the GPU does most of the heavy lifting in gaming. We also got a major reduction in case temps and noise by going from the hot-and-loud 9800 GT to the silent-and-cool GTX 750 Ti. The old card ran at 83 C under load, while the new one only hit 53 C, and made no noise whatsoever. No regretsSince we couldn't do much with the motherboard/CPU/RAM on this board without starting fresh, we upgraded what we could and achieved Kick Ass real-world results from it, so this operation upgrade was very successful. Not only does it boot faster and feel ultra-responsive, it's also ready for at least another year of gaming, thanks to its new GPU. Plus, with USB 3.0 added for storage duties, we can attach our external drives and USB keys and expect modern performance. All-in-all, this rig has been given a new lease on life for just a couple hundies—not bad for a five-year-old machine. Benchmarks
Skeleton RisesFlying the AMD flag Our second rig flies the AMD "Don't Underclock Me" flag. You know the type. No matter how wide a gap Intel opens up with its latest CPU techno-wonder, this AMD CPU fanboy won't switch until you pry that AM3 CPU from his cold, dead motherboard. In fact, the bigger the performance gap with Intel, the deeper this fanboy will dig in his heels. The box itself is built around the eye-catching and now discontinued Antec Skeleton open-air chassis. It draws a lot of whistles from case aficionados when they walk by, but truth be told, it's really not great to work in and not exactly friendly to upgrading. The base machine parts are pretty respectable, though. The mainboard is an Asus Crosshair IV (CHIV) Formula using the AMD 890FX chipset, with a quad-core 3.2GHz Phenom II X4 955 and GeForce GTX 570 graphics. For the record, this machine was not built by us, nor do we know who built it, but the original builder made the typical error of inserting the pair of 2GB DDR3/1066 DIMMs into the same channel memory slots, causing the sticks to run in single-channel mode instead of dual-channel. As any salty builder knows, there's a reason the phrase "RTFM" exists. For storage, the machine packs a single 1TB 7,200rpm hard drive and a DVD burner. Power is handled by an AntecTruePower 750, which is plenty for a rig like this. Cooling is a stock AMD affair with dual heat pipes. Specifications
The easy upgrade pathAll in all, it's not a bad PC, but the most obvious upgrade was storage. It's been a long time since we used a machine with a hard drive as the primary boot device, and having to experience it once again was simply torture. We're not saying we don't love hard drives—it's great to have 5TB of space so you never have to think about whether you have room to save that ISO or not—just not as the primary boot device. Our first choice for an upgrade was a 256GB Sandisk Ultra Plus SSD for $159. We thought about skimping for the 128GB version, but then figured it's worth the extra $60 to double the capacity—living on 128GB is difficult in this day and age. The SSD could easily be moved to a new machine, too, as it's not tied to the platform. The OS is 64-bit Windows 7 Pro, so there's no need to "upgrade" to Windows 8.1. No, we'd rather put that $119 into the two other areas that need to be touched up. The GPU, again, is the GeForce GTX 570. Not a bad card in its day, but since the Skeleton's current owner does fair bit of gaming, we decided it was worth it to invest in a GPU upgrade. We considered various options, from the GeForce GTX 770 to a midrange Radeon R9 card, but felt a GeForce GTX 760 was the right fit, considering the system's specs. It simply felt exorbitant to put a $500 GPU into this rig. Even the GTX 770 at $340 didn't feel right, but the Asus GTX760-DC2OC-2GD5 gives us all the latest Nvidia technologies, such as ShadowPlay. The card is also dead silent under heavy loads. Our next choice was riskier. We definitely wanted more performance out of the 3.2GHz Phenom II X4 955 using the old "Deneb" cores. The options included adding more cores by going to a 3.3GHz Phenom II X6 1100T Thuban, but all we'd get is two more cores and a marginal increase in clock speed. Since the Thuban and Deneb are so closely related, there would be very little to be gained in microarchitecture upgrades. X6 parts can't be found new, and they fetch $250 or more on eBay. As any old upgrading salt knows, you need to check the motherboard's list of supported chips before you plug in. The board has an AM3 socket, but just because it fits doesn't mean it works, right? Asus' website indicates it supports the 3.6GHz FX-8150 "Zambezi" using the newer Bulldozer core, but the Bulldozer didn't exactly blow us away when launched and they're also out of circulation. (Interestingly, the FX-8150 sells for less than the Phenom II X6 chips.) Upgrading the motherboard was simply out of the question, too. Our last option was the most controversial. As we said, you should always check the motherboard maker first to find out what chips are supported. After that, you should then check to see if some other adventurous user has tried to do it anyway: "Damn the CPU qual list, full upgrade ahead!" To our surprise, yes, several anonymous Internet forums have indeed dropped the 4GHz FX-8350 "Vishera" into their CHIV boards with no reported of issues. That FX-8350 is also only $199—cheaper than a used X6 part. We considered overclocking the part, but the Skeleton's confines make it pretty difficult. It's so tight that we had issues putting the GeForce GTX 760 in it, so using anything larger than the stock cooler didn't make sense to us. We're sure you can find a cooler that fit, but nothing that small would let us overclock by any good measure, so it didn't seem prudent. |
| Pre-upgrade | ||
|---|---|---|
| Cinebench R15 | 326 | 641 |
| ProShow Producer 5.0 (sec) | 3,276 | 1,794 |
| Stitch.Efx (sec) | 1,950 | 1,500 |
| Bootracer (sec) | 37.9 | 15 (+153%) |
| Batman: Arkham Origins (fps) | 58 | 81 |
| Heaven 4.0 (fps) | 29.5 | 41.9 |
One Dusty Nehalem
The original Core i7 still has some juice
It's easy to make upgrade choices on an old dog with AGP graphics and Pentium 4, or even a Core 2 Duo on an obsolete VIA P4M890 motherboard (yes, it exists, look it up.) When you get to hardware that's still reasonably fast and relatively "powerful," the upgrade choices you have to make can get quite torturous.
That's certainly the case with this PC, which has an interesting assortment of old but not obsolete parts inside the Cooler Master HAF 922 case. We've always been fans of the HAF series, and despite being just plain-old steel, the case has some striking lines. It does, however, suffer from a serious case of dust suckage. Between the giant fan in front and various other fans, this system was chock-full of the stuff.
The CPU is the first-generation Core i7-965 with a base clock of 3.2GHz and a Turbo Boost of 3.46GHz. That may seem like a pretty mild Turbo, but that's the way it was way back in 2008, when this chip was first released. It's plugged into an Asus Rampage II Extreme motherboard using the X58 chipset, and running 6GB of DDR3/1600 in triple-channel mode.
In graphics, it's also packing some heat with the three-year-old GeForce GTX 590 card. For those who don't remember it, the card has two GPU cores that basically equal a pair of GeForce GTX 570 cards in SLI. There was a secondary 1TB drive in the machine, but in the state we got it, it was still using it's primary boot device—a 300GB Western Digital Raptor 10,000rpm hard drive that was 95 percent stuffed with data. Oh, and the OS is also quite vintage, with 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate.
| Original part | Upgrade Part | Upgrade Part Cost | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Case/PSU | Cooler Master HAF 922 / PC Power and Cooling 910 | No Change | |
| CPU | 3.2GHz Core i7-965 Extreme Edition | No change | |
| Motherboard | Asus Rampage II Extreme | No Change | |
| Cooling | Stock | Corsair Hydro Cooler H75 | $69 |
| RAM | 6GB DDR3/1600 in dual-channel mode | No Change | |
| GPU | GeForce GTX 590 | No Change | |
| HDD/SSD | 300GB 10,000rpm WD Raptor, 1TB 7,200rpm Hitachi | 256GB Sandisk Ultra | $159 |
| ODD | Lite-On Blu-Ray burner | No Change | |
| OS | 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate | No Change | |
| Total upgrade cost | $277 |
Always Be Upgrading The SSD
Our first upgrade decision was easy—SSD. In its day, the 300GB Raptor was the drive to have for its performance, but with the drive running at 90 percent of its capacity, this sucker was beyond slow. Boot time on the well lived-in Vista install was just over two minutes. Yes, a two-minute boot time. By moving to an SSD and demoting the Raptor to secondary storage, the machine would see an immediate benefit in responsiveness. For most people who don't actually stress the CPU or GPU, an SSD upgrade is actually a better upgrade than buying a completely new machine. And yes, we fully realize the X58 doesn't have support for SATA 6Gb/s, but the access time of the SSD and pretty much constant read and writes at full bus speed will still make a huge difference in responsiveness.
The real conundrum was the CPU. As we said, this is the original Core i7, a quad-core chip with Hyper-Threading and support for triple-channel RAM. The CPU's base clock is 3.2GHz. It is an unlocked part, but the chip is sporting a stock 130W TDP Intel cooler. Believe it or not, this is actually how some people build their rigs—they buy the overclocked part but don't overclock until later on, when they need more performance. Well, we're at that point now, but we knew we weren't going very far with a stock Intel cooler, so we decided that this was the time to introduce a closed-loop liquid cooler in the form of a Corsair H75. Our intention was to simply overclock and call it a day, but when we saw some of the performance coming out of the AMD Skeleton, we got a little jealous. In two of our tests for this upgrade story, the AMD FX-8350 was eating the once-mighty Nehalem's lunch. Would overclocking be enough? That got us wondering if maybe we should take the LGA1366 to its next-logical conclusion: the Core i7-970. The Core i7-970 boasted six cores with Hyper-Threading for a total of 12 threads. It has the same base clock of 3.2GHz and same Turbo Boost of 3.46GH, but it uses the newer and faster 32nm "Westmere" cores. Long since discontinued, it's easy to find the chips used for about $300, which is about half its original price. This is that conundrum we spoke of—while the Westmere would indeed be faster, especially on thread-heavy tasks such as video encoding and 3D modeling, do we really want to spend $300 on a used CPU? That much money would almost get us a Core i7-4770K, which would offer far more performance in more apps. Of course, we'd have to buy a new board for that, too. In the end, we got cold feet and decided to stick with just an overclock.
Windows Vista Works
Even our OS choice had us tied up. There's a reason Windows Vista was a hated OS when it was released. It was buggy, slow, and drivers for it stunk. For the most part, though, Windows Vista turned into a usable OS once Service Pack 1 was released, and Service Pack 2 made it even better. While we'd never buy Vista over Windows 7 today, it's actually functional, and the performance difference isn't as big as many believe it to be, when it's on a faster system. The only real shortcoming of Windows Vista is the lack of trim support for the SSD. That means the build would have to have the SSD manually optimized using the drive's utility, or we'd have to count on its garbage collection routines. For now, we'd rather put the $119 in the bank toward the next system build with, perhaps, Windows 9.
Even more difficult was our choice on the GPU. The GeForce GTX 590 was a top-of-the-line card and sold for $700 in 2011. Obviously, this card was put into the system after the box was initially built, so it has had one previous upgrade. In looking at our upgrade options, our first thought was to go for something crazy—such as a second GTX 590 card. They can be found used for about $300. That would give the machine Quad SLI performance at far less the cost of a newer top-tier GPU. That fantasy went up in smoke when we realized the PC Power and Cooling Silencer 910 had but two 8-pin GPU power connectors and we'd need a total of four to run Quad SLI. Buying another expensive PSU just to run Quad SLI just didn't make sense in the grand scheme of things, since the PSU is perfectly functional and even still under warranty. Once the second GTX 590 was ruled out, we considered a GeForce GTX 780 Ti as an option. While the 780 Ti is a beast, we came to the realization that the GTX 590 honestly still has plenty of legs left, especially for gaming at 1080p. The 780 Ti is indeed faster by 20 to 50 percent, but we decided not to go that route, as the machine still produces very passable frame rates. In the end, we spent far less upgrading this machine than the other two. But perhaps that makes sense, as its components are much newer and faster than the other two boxes.
Post-upgrade performance
With our only upgrades on this box being an overclock and an SSD, we didn't expect too much—but we were pleasantly surprised. Our mild overclock took the part to 4GHz full-time. That's 800MHz over the base clock speed. In Cinebench R15, the clock speed increase mapped pretty closely to the performance difference. In both ProShow Producer and Stitch.Efx, though, we actually saw greater performance than the simple overclock can explain. We actually attribute the better performance to the SSD. While encoding tasks are typically CPU-bound, disk I/O can make a difference. Stitch.Efx also spits out something on the order 20,000 files while it creates the gigapixel image. The SSD, of course, made a huge difference in boot times and system responsiveness, even if it wasn't on a SATA 6Gb/s port.
Regrets
Overall, we were happy with our upgrade choices, with the only gnawing concern being not upgrading the GPU. It just ate us up knowing we could have seen even better frame rates by going to the GTX 780 Ti. But then, we also have $750 in our pocket that can go toward the next big thing.
| Pre-upgrade | ||
|---|---|---|
| Cinebench R15 64-bit | 515 | 617 |
| ProShow Producer 5.0 (sec) | 2,119 | 1,641 |
| Stitch.Efx (sec) | 1,446 | 983 |
| Bootracer (sec) | 126 | 18 (+600%) |
| Batman: Arkham Origins (fps) | 86 | 87 |
| Heaven 4.0 (fps) | 68.2 | 68.7 |
How to upgrade from Windows XP
It's game over, man!
Stick a fork in it. It's done. Finito. Windows XP is a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in peace… on a considerable number of desktops worldwide, much to Microsoft's chagrin.
You've read Microsoft's early-2012 announcement. You've seen all the news since then: the warnings, the pleas, the tomes of comments from frustrated users who wish they could just have a fully supported Windows XP until the launch of Windows 20. If you were a holdout, you even got a few pop-ups directly in your operating system from Microsoft itself, imploring you to switch on up to a more powerful (re: supported) version of Windows. So says Microsoft:
"If you continue to use Windows XP after support ends, your computer should still work, but it will become five times more vulnerable to security risks and viruses. And as more software and hardware manufacturers continue to optimize for more recent versions of Windows, a greater number of programs and devices like cameras and printers won't work with Windows XP."
There you have it: Keep on keepin' on with Windows XP and you'll slowly enter the wild, wild west of computing. We can't say that your computer is going to be immediately infected once you reach a set time period past what's been chiseled on the operating system's tombstone. However, the odds of you suffering an attack that Microsoft has no actual fix for certainly increase. You wouldn't run a modern operating system without the latest security patches; why Windows XP?
So, what's a person to do? Upgrade, obviously. We do warn in advance that if your current Windows XP machine is chock-full of legacy apps (or you're using more antiquated hardware like, dare we say it, a printer attached to a parallel port), then you might find that upgrading to a newer version of the OS ruins the experience you previously had. For that, we can only suggest taking advantage of the ability of newer versions of Windows to support virtualized Windows XP environments—Windows 7 supports the Virtual PC–based "Windows XP Mode" natively, whereas those on Windows 8 can benefit from freeware like Virtualbox to run a free, Microsoft-hosted download of a virtualized Windows XP.
As for what you should upgrade to, and how, we're recommending that you go with Windows 8—unless you can find Windows 7 for extremely cheap. Microsoft has greatly improved resource use in its flagship OS, in addition to streamlining startup times, adding more personalization, and beefing up security. Windows 8 has far more time before its end-of-life than Windows 7, even though, yes, you'll have to deal with the Modern UI a bit when you make your upgrade.
Step-by-Step Upgrade Guide
Anyone can upgrade, but there is a right way and wrong way
The Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor is a bit more useful than the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant in terms of actionable items that you'll want to know about. Doesn't hurt to run both!
Will your legacy system even run a modern version of Windows? That's the first thing you're going to want to check before you start walking down the XP-to-8 upgrade path. Microsoft has released two different tools to help you out—only one of them works for Windows XP, however. Hit up Microsoft's site and do a search for "Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant." Download that, install it on your Windows XP machine, and run the application.
After a (hopefully) quick scan of your system, the program will report back the number of apps and devices you're using that are compatible with Windows 8. In a perfect world, that would be all of them. However, the tool will also report back fatal flaws that might prevent you from running Windows 8 on your Windows XP machine to begin with—like, for example, if your older motherboard and CPU don't support the Windows 8–required Data Execution Prevention.
Since Windows 8 is quite a bit removed, generation-wise, from Windows XP, there's no means by which you can simply run an in-place upgrade that preserves your settings and installed applications. Personal files, yes, but now's as good a time as any to get your data organized prior to the big jump—no need to have Windows 8 muck things up for you, as it will just create a "windows.old" folder that's a dump of the "Documents and Settings" folders on your XP system.
If you have a spare hard drive lying around, you could always clone your current disk using a freeware app like Clonezilla, install Windows 8 on your old drive, and sort through everything later. If not, then you're going to want to grab some kind of portable storage—or, barring that, sign up for a cloud-based storage service—and begin the semi-arduous task of poring over your hard drive for all of your important information.
The Windows Easy Transfer app, downloadable from Microsoft, helps automate the otherwise manual process of copying your files from your XP machine to portable storage.
There really isn't a great tool that can help you out in this regard, except perhaps WinDirStat—and that's only assuming that you've stored chunks of your important data in key areas around your hard drive. If worse comes to worse, you could always back up the entire contents of your "Documents and Settings" folder, just to be safe. It's unlikely that you'll have much critical data in Program Files or Windows but, again, it all depends on what you've been doing on your PC. Gamers eager to make sure that their precious save files have been preserved can check out the freeware GameSave Manager to back up their progress.
As for your apps, you're going to have to reinstall those. You can, however, simplify this process by using a tool like Ninite to quickly and easily install common apps. CCleaner, when installed on your old XP system, can generate a list of all the apps that you've previously installed within the operating system—handy for making a checklist for things you'll want to reinstall later, we suppose. And finally, an app like Magical Jelly Bean's Product Key Finder can help you recover old installation keys for apps that you might want to reinstall within Windows 8.
Need to know what you'll need to reinstall in Windows 8? Use CCleaner to make a simple text file of every app you installed on Windows XP, and check off as you go!
As for installing Windows 8, we recommend that you purchase and download the ISO version of the operating system and then use Microsoft's handy Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool to dump the contents of that ISO onto a portable flash drive. Your installation process will go much faster, trust us. From there, installing the OS is as easy as inserting your USB storage, resetting your computer, and booting from the flash drive—which might be accessible via some "boot manager" option during your system's POST, or might be a boot order–related setting that you have to set up within the BIOS itself.
Other than that, the installation process is fairly straightforward once Windows 8 gets going. You'll enter your product key, select a Custom installation, delete or format your drive partitions, install Windows 8 on the new chunk of blank, empty storage, and sit back and relax while the fairly simple installation process chugs away.
You might not have the speediest of operating systems once Windows 8 loads, depending on just how long your Windows XP machine has been sitting around, but at least you'll be a bit more secure! And, hey, now that you have a license key, you can always upgrade your ancient system (or build a new one!) and reinstall.
Microsoft's Windows Insider Program for Windows 10 Hits 1 Million Registrants
Posted: 13 Oct 2014 11:02 AM PDT
Over a third of Windows 10 users are running the OS on a virtual machine
Microsoft caught the tech community off guard when it skipped over Windows 9 and jumped directly to Windows 10 -- so for much for those rumors of Windows 9 being a free upgrade for Windows 8 users! Alternative theories aside (such as lazy coding), the move to Windows 10 is a marketing ploy, and if the goal is make users curious, it's working. Over the weekend, Microsoft's Windows Insider Program hit 1 million registrants.
Signing up for the Windows Insider Program is a prerequisite to downloading the Windows 10 Technical Preview, and while Microsoft didn't provide specific download figures, the company stated in a blog post that those 1 million registrants "equates to a lot of people" using the new OS.
Microsoft's goal with the Technical Preview is to get feedback from users (or if you're wearing your conspiracy theory cap, it's to spy on users and collect personal data). In the less than two weeks since Windows 10 has been available to the public, Microsoft has collected over 200,000 pieces of feedback submitted via the Windows Feedback app.
According to Microsoft, "only 36 percent" of Windows 10 Technical Preview installations are on a virtual machine (VM); the rest are on actual PCs. While Microsoft says it's "cool" to use a VM if you want, the amount of users running the OS on an actual PC makes the company confident that the majority of feedback is based on "medium-term" use rather than just a few minutes of experimentation.
Other fun stats -- around 68 percent of Windows 10 users are launching more than seven apps per day. A quarter of Windows 10 users have been launching more than 26 apps per day, while 5 percent average 68 app launches on any given day.
Newegg Daily Deals: Intel Core i5 4570 Haswell, AMD FX-8320E Vishera, and More!
Posted: 13 Oct 2014 10:33 AM PDT
Top Deal:
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Other Deals:
Samsung 840 Pro Series 2.5-inch 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive for $90 with free shipping
AMD FX-8320E Vishera 8-Core 3.2GHz (4.0GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 95W Desktop Processor for $140 with free shipping (normally $150 - use coupon code: [EMCWPWP93])
G.Skill Trident X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory for $155 with free shipping (normally $165 - use coupon code: [EMCWPWP29])
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Ryse: Son of Rome Lands on PC Supporting 4K, Gets Panned for Repetitive Gameplay
Posted: 13 Oct 2014 09:38 AM PDT
Xbox One launch title makes its way to PC
Ryse: Son of Rome is a third-person action-adventure game developed by Crytek and published by Microsoft Studios as a launch title for the Xbox One back in November of last year. However, Crytek announced a little over a month ago that it would ship to PC on October 10, and in case you missed it, Ryse: Son of Rome is now available on Steam for $40, along with a pair of hotfixes to address freezing cutscene issues.
The port to PC comes with 4K Ultra HD resolution support, along with supersampling and other eye candy, ultimately allowing for superior visuals than you'll get with an Xbox One connected to a Full HD 1080p television. However, the same criticisms apply -- gameplay is repetitive.
While we have yet to post our own review of Ryse, our sister site/magazine PC Gamer scored Ryse a 57 out of 100. Short and to the point, PC Gamer concluded that "Ryse: Son of Rome's combat and incredible graphics are entertaining, but it's too narrow and repetitive, even for a short ride." Bummer.
In any event, you can watch the 4K launch trailer below, and if interested, pick Ryse up on Steam.
Oops! Dropbox Bug in Selective Sync Inadvertently Deletes Files
Posted: 13 Oct 2014 08:57 AM PDT
Bad things happen in the cloud, too
The reason we're constantly preaching the merits of maintaining multiple backups -- especially when it comes to mission critical files -- is because your data is never safe, no matter where you put it. That includes the cloud. As a sobering reminder of this, Dropbox has been sending out letters to some of its users alerting them to a Selective Sync bug that inadvertently deleted their data.
"We're reaching out to let you know about a Selective Sync issue that affected a small number of Dropbox users. Unfortunately, some your files were deleted when the Dropbox desktop application was shut down or restarted while you were applying Selective Sync settings," the email reads.
In some cases, Dropbox was able to recover some of the deleted files, though that wasn't always the case. Casual users aren't likely to be affected by this, though for people who upload large amounts of data, Selective Sync is a handy feature that lets you choose which Dropbox folders get synched on the desktop.
According to Slash Gear, the problem in this case is traceable to an older and unmaintained version of the desktop client when Selective Sync is enabled. What that ultimately means is that not a ton of Dropbox users were affected by this, though that's little consolation to the ones who saw their files disappear into the cloud, never to return.
Not without remorse, Dropbox apologized for the situation and is giving affected users one free year of Dropbox Pro service.
AMD Rumored to Refresh Never Settle Game Bundle
Posted: 13 Oct 2014 08:24 AM PDT
More free titles from AMD might be on the way
With the recent launch of Nvidia's Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 970 and 980 graphics cards, the pressure is on AMD to respond, especially since we haven't heard much about its Tonga XT architecture as of late. One alternative to releasing a new graphics card that's proved popular is giving away free games, and rumor has it AMD is getting ready to announce a new Never Settle bundle.
That's according to news and rumor site Fudzilla, which says it learned that AMD is planning the new game bundle for a launch later this month. There hasn't been a lot of chatter about the specific titles that will be included, though one that's cropped up around the rumor mill is Sid Meier's Civilization: Beyond Earth.
AMD has supposedly told its hardware partners to be on standby for the announcement. If true, the refreshed Never Settle bundle would come not long after the recent price cuts that retailers doled out to the Radeon R9 290 and 290X graphics cards, which can now be had for as little as $276 (street) and $360 (also street), respectively (or lower with mail-in-rebate).
Samsung Supercharges Wi-Fi, Develops Standard That's 5X Faster
Posted: 13 Oct 2014 05:48 AM PDT
Much faster Wi-Fi technology is due out in 2015
Want faster Wi-Fi? Well hang onto your shorts because Samsung just announced the development of a 60GHz Wi-Fi technology that it claims will improve today's speeds by a factor of five. Under ideal conditions, you would be able to transfer a 1GB movie between devices in under three seconds. The technology would also allow for uncompressed high-definition videos to stream from mobile devices to TVs in real-time.
Samsung says the 802.11ad 60GHz Wi-Fi standard can hit data transfer speeds of up to 4.5Gbps, or 575MB/s -- that's roughly five times faster than 866Mbps, or 108MB/s, offered on several of today's high-end 802.11ac equipment. The secret sauce behind Samsung's blazing fast recipe is the elimination of co-channel interference on the 60GHz band, no matter how many devices are on the network. In essence, Samsung is closing the gap between theoretical and actual speeds.
"Samsung has successfully overcome the barriers to the commercialization of 60GHz millimeter-wave band Wi-Fi technology, and looks forward to commercializing this breakthrough technology," said Kim Chang Yong, Head of DMC R&D Center of Samsung Electronics. "New and innovative changes await Samsung's next-generation devices, while new possibilities have been opened up for the future development of Wi-Fi technology."
Another key to this high-speed awesomeness is the development of what Samsung claims is the world's first micro beamingforming control technology that can adapt to changes in the environment in 1/3,000 seconds.
This isn't a far off technology, either. At present, 60GHz is an unlicensed band spectrum, with commercialization expected next year.
Zeiss VR One is a $99 Smartphone-powered VR Headset
Posted: 13 Oct 2014 01:08 AM PDT
Up for pre-order now
Despite all the recent buzz, the fact remains that the immediate commercial prospects of virtual reality head mounted displays (HMDs) aren't nearly as bright as many like to imagine and it could be quite a while before such devices become mainstream — something even Oculus Rift creator Palmer Luckey admitted a while back. Even that isn't enough to deter new companies from entering this incipient market, though. The latest entrant is widely renowned German optics company Zeiss.
The company is entering the VR fray with the Zeiss VR One, a Samsung Gear VR-type mobile VR goggle that, unlike the Note 4-exclusive Gear VR, is compatible with both the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and the 5.1-inch Samsung Galaxy S5, with support for other smartphone models between 4.7-inch and 5.2-inch in the pipeline. Up for pre-order now, the Zeiss VR One has a price tag of $99.99. This price not only includes the Zeiss VR One but also a smartphone tray, which will set you back $9.99 when bought alone. The company expects the first units to "ship before Christmas 2014."
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Effort to Port Minecraft to Windows Phone Already Underway
Posted: 12 Oct 2014 11:29 PM PDT
That was fast
Over the past month or so, Microsoft's $2.5 billion acquisition of Minecraft developer Mojang has spawned many debates (including our inaugural Maximum Debate article) about its merits and long-term viability. The long-term strategic rationale for the deal may not be readily apparent — if one exists at all, that is — but it's probably safe to say that bringing Minecraft to Windows Phone is the immediate objective, a fact that is borne out by a recent tweet by the game's lead developer Jens Bergensten.
Jens Bergensten on Friday took to Twitter to confirm an ongoing effort to port Minecraft: Pocket Edition to Windows Phone. In fact, a working (but far from perfect) port already exists. "Yes, Minecraft: Pocket Edition *is* coming to the Windows Phone! The port runs already, but there's still much to do before any release," Bergensten wrote.
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Surface Hub App Delivers Pen Customization to Surface Pro 3 Users
Posted: 12 Oct 2014 09:24 PM PDT
At long last, Microsoft gives Surface Pro 3 owners the ability to adjust stylus sensitivity
When Microsoft pushed out an out-of-band Surface Pro 3 firmware update earlier this week, it said the update was meant to enable "additional upcoming configuration options" for the tablet's stylus, leaving us to wonder as to what those additional options might be. The suspense is now over.
It turns out that the recent Surface Pen driver update was meant to pave the way for the new Surface Hub app, which in turn is intended to address a long-standing gripe of many Surface Pro 3 owners by finally giving them the ability to customize the Surface Pen's pressure sensitivity. The new feature isn't perfect, though. The Surface Pro Artist's Rick Rodriguez, who appears to have put the new configuration through its paces rather thoroughly, is "very disappointed by the lowest pressure sensitivity setting." There are seven pressure sensitivity in all.
Other than pressure sensitivity, Hub also lets the user specify the version of OneNote (desktop or Modern) that they would like to be opened when the Surface Pen's top button is pressed.
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