What Hardware Affects Performance On A Windows 7 PC?

johnhoh · 27 May 2017

Mulsiphix said:

IBut you guys are pretty darn sure that an SSD HD for Windows and more RAM should provide me with the kick that I need? Wouldn't upgrading to 4 or 6 cores and upping the ram by 5-ish times (I have 3GB currently) provide a superior performance boost?

No, and yes. Your cpu is killing you right now.

PassMark - Intel Core2 Duo E4300 @ 1.80GHz - Price performance comparison

general purpose speed is almost completely constrained by cpus today, as long as you have enough memory (say 8GB). But if you do not have an SSD yet, its time to get with the program! $99 for a 275GB M.2 MX300 and you'll never go back (for boot drive plus programs - keep your spinning drive just for data). Or if you are really tight for money then go with a $50 standard sized SSD with 128GB. You don't need much space on your boot drive.

A B250 intel board plus whatever intel skylake or kabylake cpu you want - they are all priced according to the bang, that is, they're about equal bang for buck.

ThrashZone · 27 May 2017

Hi,
Yep at least a quad core would be best being this is memorial day weekend sells are on :)
Too bad I'm not interested in kabylake z270 mobo's there are some good deals

z170 and skylake too there are some good deals now that kabylake is out which is the last hardware win-7 can be installed on.

RoasterMen · 27 May 2017

Microsoft's borked out support for Skylake and Kabylake products. Ryzen as well. Haswell's are the good choice right now plus they also work with Windows 10 smoothly :)

johnhoh · 27 May 2017

just a point regarding kaby lake and windows 7. There are no architectural reasons that kaby lake cpus should not be able to flawlessly run windows7 and/or windows update, but because both intel and microsoft prefer that you upgrade to windows 10, each has created minor annoyances to stop you from running kaby lake on windows 7. To eliminate these annoyances, here is what you do:

to use a kaby lake cpu in windows 7 requires 4 steps:

1) install windows 7 as you normally would

2) modify the inf file on the latest intel win10 HD630 driver so it will install on win7 (only needed if you are going to use onboard graphics. If you have a pci-e video card and have onboard video disabled in bios, disregard this step)

Intel g4560 kabylake on windows 7 64 bit - Page 3 - Windows 7 Help Forums

3) modify windows update by running zeffy's batch file so windows update will no longer give you the "unsupported hardware" message

GitHub - zeffy/kb4012218-19: ðŸ“ Research paper on KB4012218/KB4012219 and a patch to re-enable Windows updates on Kaby Lake/Ryzen PCs running Windows 7 and 8.1

4) Run windows update to get up to date as you normally would

been running win7 on my kaby lake for 4 months now, zero issues after performing above steps.