My new computer is slower than expected.

Hello all,

I recently built my own workstation. I am a web/software developer and I wanted something that would have plenty of gusto for my work. After putting it all together though, I am not impressed with the performance. It doesn't seem to be any faster at startup or in loading applications than my previous tower (hp s5123w).

It also will not resume from sleep. The hdd light blinks and everything looks like its on but the desktop does not ever show up again.

I am hoping that someone familiar with windows and hardware can tell me about some some diagnostics or tweaks that I need to make in order to get things up to speed.

Thank you all for your responses.


System Specs:

OS - Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
CPU - AMD Phenom II X4 955
Motherboard - MSI 890FXA-GD70
Memory - 6GB PC3-12800 Patriot Viper II Sector 7
Graphics Card(s) - ATI Radeon HD 5830 1GB GDDR5
Hard Drives - 2X WD Scorpio Blue 500GB RAID 2+0
PSU - Thermaltake 500W
Cooling - Air

All drivers are installed and up to date.

WEI
Processor - 7.3
Memory - 7.3
Graphics - 7.6
Gaming Graphics - 7.6
Primary HDD - 5.9

Loading apps and startup speed is about 80% a function of the HD acess time and 19% the tranfer rate and 1% everything else. If you want faster startup times and blistering app launch speeeds you NEED to go SSD... In fact an SSD boot drive can make a 5 year old computer seem almost new, and it makes new computers run like they SHOULD

Thank you all for your replies.

It seems pretty much unanimous that an SSD is the solution.

Just to be more clear about my HW, I bought 2 WD Scorpio Blue 500GB 7200RPM HDDs available here. I have them set up in RAID 0 (typo in my original post) via the on board RAID controller(AMD SB850). It was my understanding that I would see better performance from my HDDs if I had them setup with striping.

I am comparing my speed with the tower that I started working on. The specs of my old system were AMD Sempron 2.6GHz single-core processor, 4GB RAM, 1TB WD 5400rpm HDD, Geforce 8800GS 256MB Video Card. This machine worked well enough for what I was doing but I wanted something that would last through some future projects that I have.

The issue is that I am not seeing a whole lot better performance from my new machine in comparison. The new one is waaaaaaay better with multi-tasking but, the graphical capabilities are not (yet) worth the money that I paid for the upgrade.

That is my dilemma. I mostly run the adobe CS5 suite (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Illustrator, Bridge). The OpenGL animations in Photoshop are choppy even though I have a graphics card that exceeds the requirements.

What I am looking for for help is whether or not there are some adjustments that I can make to windows, drivers, bios, etc that will make my system run smoother.

Again, I thank everyone for their comments and advice. Criticism is also welcome.

KromaCast

How does openeing photoshop in 1.5 seconds on a SSD sound? Well before you load it up with fonts and plugins anyway... Mine is up to about 5 seconds from double click to being able to paint.

Well about the 3D in Photoshop. I've had only limited experiences with it and I was /seriously/ underwhelmed The hardware acellerated compositing works well for me though. Do you have anything else like Blender maybe? Just to test that your card has all the proper OGL drivers installed? Blender works like a dream for me (on Nvidia) but PhotoShop (extended) is a bit clunky with the 3d support It's first gen and sort of barely useable IMHO, I really don't use it at all. I would maybe ask on the adobe forums about slow 3d in Photoshop. You may need some specific driver to actually get it fully HW acellerated.

Bridge is always slow, it is always searching your entire machine and network all the time, it's just plain slow to open (though should be generally ok afterwards)