A few days ago I posted regarding a computer issue I was having and asked for some input regarding it. On my blog, Amateur radio.com and a computer geek site I subscribe too I received lots of great feedback. The consensus seemed to be I was having graphic card issues or maybe RAM issues.........or both! Yesterday I decided to haul the PC tower out from within my roll top desk. It's a real pain to do as I have to get in behind the desk and remove off the cabling........but it is what it is. The plan was to take the most common advice I received and look at the graphics card and the RAM. I also updated the graphics card software as it was out of date.
Right off the but I noticed the graphics card was seated but one clip that snaps the card in place was not engaged and the card seemed loose. I ended up removing both the 2 RAM cards and the video card, cleaned them off and replace them. The inside of the PC was dust bunny free as it was just a short time ago I had it open and cleaned it with compressed air. Once everything was back in place with the side covers still off I started the PC just to make sure the 3 cooling fans, CPU fan and graphics card fan were all running and they were.
Everything is back together now and it's a wait and see game to see if the issue happens again. Some of the advice I received was that it was about time to purchase a new PC. I agree that mine is not lightning-fast and by no means do I need a gaming computer so it was off to the internet for input. I came across WA7EWC post regarding this very subject. He has great information in his post and one tidbit was regarding the benchmark of your processor. He suggested anything between 3000-8000 and you should be good to go. I bench-marked my processor and it came back with a score of 5340. It seems I am middle of the road and I am happy with that.
For me to upgrade and with what I want to spend I am just moving up the ladder a tiny bit regarding processor speed and so on. To tell you the truth sometimes you can get lost in the PC specs and speed and the reality is I may not even notice a difference in the speed. To move up to something where I notice a difference means spending close to or over 1,000.00 and I am not prepared to do that. I may end up getting a solid-state hard drive as an upgrade but first I want to make sure the graphics card or whatever the issue is has been solved. I also can overclock or as AMD calls it "turbo speed" the PC to 4 GHz from 3.5 but again that would mean spending money on a new CPU fan as the stock one I have won't cut the cooling required............and will I notice a difference between 3.5 and 4.0 GHz?
This PC was built by me and I like doing it that way as I get what I want and can tinker with it. I have noticed brand name PC's on the market now there is little room for expanding and I am not too keen on that.
2 comments:
Hey Mike, I built a very high performance gaming PC in the shack to run my very demanding Flight Simulation software, so it's virtually resting when it runs radio-related programs. But in another room, I use a pretty "mediocre" laptop to run radio software and it copes perfectly well. No need for 5GHz cpu and superfast DDR5 ram.
The only thing that I DID change in the slow laptop, was an SSD hard drive (which made an incredible difference (bigger the better)) and more of the type of ram which was already installed. I was going to overclock (as I have done on the big gaming machine) but you end up putting everything under unnecessary strain for little gain.
Glad to see you're sorted anyway.
73, Tom, M7MCQ
www.m7mcq.com
Good morning Tom and as always very nice to hear from you, it's always a nice feeling to put a PC together yourself. I agree and will be looking at a SSD hard drive in around 1TB. I am thinking of the Samsung or the WD blue drive. Also, I am now leaning toward Win10 but may very soon in the future put a post out to see how other hams out there are getting along with Win10. I did try it once but I found the audio for my digi programs was very glitchy. The sound card would just stop working while operating FT8. Anyway that is for another time and post.
Have a great weekend,
73,
Mike
VE9KK
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