two performance questions

Hi all - I have two systems and there is one thing on each that is kind of slow that I'm wondering if its possible to speed up through software or hardware changes. I'm pretty picky about wanting super responsiveness all the time and I doubt most people would complain at all about these issues, but I just want to see if we can speed things up. btw my internet connection speed is great, about 250MB per second when measured using a speed test and I use the google dns serves for dns (they're just a couple miles away). Here's my questions:


Sys1 is win7 pro, samsung ssd 850, 3.4ghz i7-2600k, ga-z68ma motherboard, 16gb memory, Radeon hd4670 video card. I'm not a gamer at all and the system seems super fast all the time, except when I am scrolling within lotus 1-2-3 (used for work) and viewing graphs that have 10 to 30 thousand data points per data series. These are huge graphs and the displaying of them takes a few seconds per graph, so if I need to peruse through several graphs it can take a minute or so. I'm wondering what if any system upgrades might make this faster. Since it is the "drawing" of the graphs that causes the delay, I'm not sure if the delay is due to a load on the processor, or the memory, or the video card. So that's my first question.

Sys2 is win7 pro, samsung ssd 850, 3.1ghz amd a8-7600 cpu, f2a88xm-hd3 motherboard, 8gb memory, Radeon R7 on-board graphics. This one is used mainly for browsing, and the delay comes when I open maybe 10 firefox tabs all at once. Takes maybe 20-30 seconds for them to load and though you'd think the delay here is normal for loading so many tabs at once, Sys1 loads these tabs in half the time that Sys2 does, so figured I'd ask what might be holding Sys2 back on this. Both boards have 1GB ethernet ports, virus scanners currently disabled, not sure if win7 or firefox settings are the same on each system, download speeds are the same on each system.

Thanks for any input.

If it's the old 123 it won't be able to understand modern CPU so won't be able to use more than 1 core system two are you running 64 bit FF that may well be the network what is your network speed

First Answer: I would say that the graphics card is the one that has to be upgrade as you're working with heavy images.
Download and run this hardware monitor HWiNFO - Download
You going to find witch hardware is working hard.

Second Answer: As Firefox doesn't have the same configurations, it's difficult to compare.
The Firefox-Backup-Tool makes a backup of all Firefox configuration so you can make a backup and then restore the config of sys1 to sys2 and then restore it back.
Download Firefox Backup Tool

excellent, thanks for the input guys. I just ran hwinfo while scrolling through the graphs on Sys1 and while the gpu utilization did not get above 4%, the four cpu cores all spiked to 50-%70% (on the thread 0s that is. The thread 1s all stayed at 0%)

Then I opened ten firefox tabs at once on each machine (after upgrading to 64 bit) and the cpu utilization again got up to 50%-70% on each machine, though clearly higher on Sys2 than Sys1. Max download speed was 20% higher on Sys1.

It looks like the cpu is the limiting factor in both situations. Its interesting that Lotus 1-2-3 is a 1998 program yet still appeared to load up 4 of the 8 available threads.

edit: I did run use that firefox backup program to load the same firefox profile on each system

Sys1 ran it at 18000 MB/s and Sys2 was 9400 MB/s

passmark results

Sys1 (intel i7-2600k)
overall 3012
cpu 9510
2d graphics 773
3d graphics 531
disk 25634
memory 2596

Sys2 (amd a8-7600)
overall 2482
cpu 5713
2d graphics 522
3d graphics 990
disk 12843
memory 1087

What stands out to me is on the amd, the onboard 3D graphics were pretty good but the memory is pretty lame