Building a 'High Performance' Windows 7 PC

I would certainly recommend going larger than a 32GB SSD drive for Windows. I wouldn't personally go smaller than a 128GB drive. The Windows install itself for 64-bit will be approaching 9GB and you are going to want a good number of your applications installed to the drive as well.

With regards to RAM...more isn't necessarily better. So unless you really have something that is going to chew up RAM (like running lots of virtual machines), 6GB (triple channel) and 8GB (dual channel) should suffice for just about everything.

With regards to processors, the entry level Core i7's are not terribly expensive and performance wise they are the way to go. My box currently has a Q9550 Quad Core in it and it performs great.

Good post. I appreciate it

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echrada said:

With Windows 7 release candidate just around the corner, the other day I was asked to spec out a high performance PC suitable for Windows 7 64-bit, This system would also be a great Vista system.

Note: Just to clarify that this is a “high performance” PC, and not a “sky’s the limit, money no object” system. I am therefore choosing parts that offer the best bang for the buck at the high end, and not the very best, bleeding edge components.

Here’s the spec I came up with

Building a "High Performance" Windows 7 PC | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com

Be careful! High performance PC's and modern Operating Systems don't equate to great performance. Keep in mind Vista / Windows 7 "intelligently" wants to fill all of your RAM with applications you might want to run later on.

But isn't that poor use of RAM you ask? Well not according to the Microsoft engineers / zealots who insist "Free RAM is wasted RAM". All I can say is research this yourself. Don't take my word or so-called "experts" on these forums as 'gospel'.

Just keep in mind the majority of the professional IT community in Academia, Federal and State governments stayed away from deploying Vista and possibly even Windows 7 due to the above performance crippling technologies.

spazzie said:

Be careful! High performance PC's and modern Operating Systems don't equate to great performance. Keep in mind Vista / Windows 7 "intelligently" wants to fill all of your RAM with applications you might want to run later on.

But isn't that poor use of RAM you ask? Well not according to the Microsoft engineers / zealots who insist "Free RAM is wasted RAM". All I can say is research this yourself. Don't take my word or so-called "experts" on these forums as 'gospel'.

Just keep in mind the majority of the professional IT community in Academia, Federal and State governments stayed away from deploying Vista and possibly even Windows 7 due to the above performance crippling technologies.

Well, to test these theories and see exactly for myself how Windows 7 stacked up against Windows XP, I performed a slew of tests with my handy stopwatch and some real world things that I do regularly.

I posted my results in this thread;
My Speed Tests: XP SP2 -vs- Win7 Ultimate 32bit

As everybody here can plainly see. Experience with Windows 7 while performing no tweaking whatsoever, performed on par and better in some areas than Windows XP with the tests that I threw at it.

So I challenge those who disagree (spazzie...I'm talking to you), to take the time to perform some quantitative tests of their own to prove their statements....rather than just sit back and use slow adoption rates of businesses, schools and governments to adopt something new as conclusive evidence.

I've worked in some of these businesses and the reasons for slow adoption for Vista were 1). costs of licensing new software that didn't provide features deemed critical for business use 2). needing some machine upgrades to handle new OS requirements 3). having to re-create images already built on other OS's to deploy. 4). learning curve and training required to get users up to proficient levels with something new.

Of these reasons, the older machines isn't that much of an issue anymore as machines have been upgraded over the past few years and will work good with Windows 7. In addition, Windows 7 performs better than Windows Vista on lower-end hardware...so even the holdouts shouldn't have much of a problem anymore.

GreyWolf said:

I Run the Q9550 with 8Gb of RAM ... She flies. All I need now is a SSD (Solid State Hard Drive) for additional performance

I doubt you will ever get performance from a SSD drive in Windows 7 as the OS overheads cause contention between the users workload and the resources it wants to claim (basically everything).

One great example we use here at work to test Windows 7 readiness for the corporate environment is this:

Open Windows 7 Explorer and start a copy process of several large files in the background. While this is happening, ALT-TAB to your foreground apps and perform a few daily activities ... open up control panel, explorer, browse the web.

Note how unresponsive your own foreground applications become since Windows 7 will cause RAM contention as it aggressively uses all available RAM for its file operations.

In Windows XP this does not occur! Its just another reason to stay with XP unfortunately.

spazzie

Just wondering if you ran those subjective tests as pparks suggested.

Ken

pparks1 said:

Well, to test these theories and see exactly for myself how Windows 7 stacked up against Windows XP, I performed a slew of tests with my handy stopwatch and some real world things that I do regularly.


So I challenge those who disagree (spazzie...I'm talking to you), to take the time to perform some quantitative tests of their own to prove their statements....rather than just sit back and use slow adoption rates of businesses, schools and governments to adopt something new as conclusive evidence.

Well at this stage of my testing, XP is providing myself, the user with a superior computing experience.

I can click on the Word 2007 shortcut and it opens within 4 seconds (not sure how you got 20 seconds???). After opening/closing word, other office apps open in around 2 seconds (pretty much instantly). So great performance on a SATA 7200RPM disk as you would expect less all the RAM overheads of Vista/Win7.