Building a 'High Performance' Windows 7 PC

[pparks1]

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.

 

[sunfowerggs]

Good post. I appreciate it

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[spazzie]

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.

 

[smarteyeball]

Get off the 'RAM' soap-box will you please, Spazzie.

You've stated your opinions, others have stated theirs - how about just leaving it alone for now mate?

 

[chinga69]

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.

i have been running seven from the pre betas on to the rtm and have not had all my ram used so where do you get the idea win7 fills the ram ?????

cheers brad

 

[Orbital Shark]

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.

You need to get off your high-horse mate. I'm was running Windows 7 on a laptop with 768MB of RAM and there was no performance lag for what I needed it for. I even had Adobe Photoshop CS4 running smoothly.

Windows 7 manages RAM better than any other OS, and moves/allocates it where it is needed. Why does everything have to be a RAM issue with you?

 

[pparks1]

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;
http://www.sevenforums.com/performa...peed-tests-xp-sp2-vs-win7-ultimate-32bit.html

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.

 

[spazzie]

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. :huh:

 

[zigzag3143]

spazzie

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

Ken

 

[spazzie]

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.

 

[spazzie]

spazzie

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

Ken

I've completed the XP testing so far Ken, Windows 7 up next.

Even in 2009, Windows XP SP3 plus a slew of post SP hotfixes / updates such as IE8 continues to amaze and provides the user with a highly responsive computing experience.

I've yet to find likewise with Vista/Windows 7 given all the disk/ram contention / demands between the user and OS.

Quality testing takes time, so hopefully within the next few days I'll upload when time permits.

 

[jokky]

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. :huh:

I've used W7 with a normal HDD and SSD and I've seen major performance gains with a Solid State Drive on W7. Booting W7 is considerably faster and opening Word 2007 takes 1 second (or less).

 

[pparks1]

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).

Huh...the performance of the SSD is basically no seek times. There can be a large gain...however many SSD drives suffer from a stuttering problem when running the OS...but that is the technology and not the OS.

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.

Alright, I just tried this on my Windows 7 box. I started copying a couple of virtual machines. 4 files at approx 14GB. I was easily able to move all over the box to any running foreground app. Surfing the web was just fine. I have no idea why this has ground your corporate machines to a halt.

Even in 2009, Windows XP SP3 plus a slew of post SP hotfixes / updates such as IE8 continues to amaze and provides the user with a highly responsive computing experience.

Well, I would hope that 8 years after release, with modern computing power having increased so dramatically, that Windows XP would be fast. To expect otherwise, would be just downright silly.

Quality testing takes time, so hopefully within the next few days I'll upload when time permits.

I'm anxiously looking forward to these test results. I'm certainly hoping you weren't taking a shot at my testing procedures since I knocked them out rather rapidly.

Any chance, you could tell me the exact tests that you are performing on Windows XP..so that I could test similarly against my hardware to compare our results?

 

[pparks1]

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???).

Go back and read what I tested. No, better yet, I will provide it here for you.

Test 4: Time to Open Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Word and Access
Windows XP SP2: 20 seconds
Windows 7 Ultimate: 17 seconds

So, what I did was open the entire office suite in 20 seconds on XP and 17 seconds on Windows 7. So, I clicked on Excel, got an empty spreadsheet, hit minimize, clicked on PowerPoint, got a blank presentation screen, minimized it, clicked on Publisher, got a blank publishing document, minimized it, clicked on Word, got a blank document, minimized it, clicked on Access, got to the blank database window. I did ALL of that in 20 seconds on XP and even faster on Windows 7...at 17 seconds.


And as far as your comment,

XP is providing myself, the user with a superior computing experience.

That isn't telling us anything whatsoever. Without some type of quantitative measure documenting exactly how one is performing over the other, these types of comments are simply not useful. Sorry.

 

[spazzie]

Huh...the performance of the SSD is basically no seek times. There can be a large gain...however many SSD drives suffer from a stuttering problem when running the OS...but that is the technology and not the OS.


Alright, I just tried this on my Windows 7 box. I started copying a couple of virtual machines. 4 files at approx 14GB. I was easily able to move all over the box to any running foreground app. Surfing the web was just fine. I have no idea why this has ground your corporate machines to a halt.

Well, I would hope that 8 years after release, with modern computing power having increased so dramatically, that Windows XP would be fast. To expect otherwise, would be just downright silly.

I'm anxiously looking forward to these test results. I'm certainly hoping you weren't taking a shot at my testing procedures since I knocked them out rather rapidly.

Any chance, you could tell me the exact tests that you are performing on Windows XP..so that I could test similarly against my hardware to compare our results?

I'll post my Windows XP Professional results first because I'll need to rebuild the PC to a Windows 7 box (or I may dual boot) and then test.

I'm using your initial testing plus a few others. Due to differences in machine specs, everyone's experience will be their own unique experience so it will be difficult to gauge a baseline.

 

[zigzag3143]

I'll post my Windows XP Professional results first because I'll need to rebuild the PC to a Windows 7 box (or I may dual boot) and then test.

I'm using your initial testing plus a few others. Due to differences in machine specs, everyone's experience will be their own unique experience so it will be difficult to gauge a baseline.

Spazzie

My experience will be very similar to yours as I just put win 7 7100 on a dell 8400 with ati, 756 ram and a tiny 40 gig HD

 

[pparks1]

Due to differences in machine specs, everyone's experience will be their own unique experience so it will be difficult to gauge a baseline.

This is a very true statement. However, you can walk away with some generalities that are going to be applicable.

For example, if you load Windows XP to a very low end box (256MB RAM, celeron processor, 40GB IDE hard drive, crappy onboard video), and find that apps load pretty slow, the machine boots rather slow and overall performance is pretty bad....obviously you aren't going to want to install anything more robust or else things are just going to get slower.

At this point, you options are to deal with the older OS and the lack of newer functionality, or upgrade the hardware. And the choice on which is more appropriate isn't always an easy decision either and sometimes it's more obvious. For example, once Microsoft no longer provides critical security updates for Windows XP..you wouldn't really want to run a business and jeopardize your clients, revenue or employees by sticking with it. To do so, would make you look rather foolish in the event of a problem. Fortunately, Microsoft supports their OS's for an insanely long period of time...therefore this hardware would almost certainly be retired prior to losing complete support for the product. And efficiency and functionality gains from a modern $500 PC, would easily cover the cost.

 

[chev65]

The way I see it, the topic in this thread has NOTHING to do with Win7 versus XP so it appears to me like somebody let somebody else change the topic of this thread to something it was never meant to be. Otherwise known as trolling.

In my opinion the person who changed the topic to his own rediculous and very incorrectly informed agenda should be warned against doing this and then banned if they don't stop.

Or maybe I'm reading the rules incorrectly but I do not see how building a high performance Windows7 PC has anything to with Windows XP.

 

[Antman]

...In my opinion the person who changed the topic to his own rediculous and very incorrectly informed agenda should be warned against doing this and then banned if they don't stop...

pparks and zag are trying very hard to educate the spazzie. spazzie continues to pop into any discussion of Win7 performance, design, use, et cetera, and begins to mechanically spew misinformation regarding Windows memory management. I admire my peers tenacity and do not envy their chosen mission. For those familiar with this ongoing struggle, at times, it seems as if spazzie is about to make progress. And then slips. This slippage may be related to molecular half-life, it may be rooted in a lack of capacity, or it may be simple trollage.

As it permeates across multiple threads, I am certain that forum management has reviewed this issue. Having wondered why the struggle is allowed to continue, I conclude that the powers that be have an interest in at least two things: How far and how deep will zag and pparks endeavor (we all benefit from their harvest), and how civil will the struggle remain. Sometimes, I think spazzie is, in reality, one of the management team. This not an unreasonable assumption, as it is difficult to remain so uninformed in the presence of so much advanced knowledge.

Every class has a worst student, and even that one deserves the opportunity to advance to their full potential. Every help desk has a best and worst tech.

 

[pparks1]

Yes, the topic did get a little off track. The original thread was about building a high performance PC...and there was commentary during the thread that even a high end PC might not perform as well as it should with modern day operating systems. So, it's a bit of a troll like post, but not entirely.