Desktop - Upgrade or Replace?

[Hudson1984]

HI all, so I built my PC in 2020 when I started working from home more. It's starting to slow down a bit now so i'm thinking of upgrading either parts or the whole machine.

I don't really game on it other than the odd run of command and conquer - nothing that's really going to push the card I have nor really push me into getting a top of the range latest one.

I think my wifi adaptor is showing it's age now and certainly needs to be replaced with Wifi 6 but wondered if I should start from scratch and build something better or just upgrade what I have.

Mostly it's a work machine, but I do use it for storing LOTS of 3d printing files, so the 1TB is way too small these days.

Other than that, what do you think I should do?

I need a new case which is half of the reason I'm starting this, and wondered if I should just move stuff over to that or replace components to give it a bigger punch. The easy answer of course would be keep what I have and simply upgrade the wifi card but after 4 years I'm wondering if I should do more whilst I'm moving it over.

at the moment I'm running:

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Six Core 4.2GHz (Socket AM4)
MSI B450M Mortar MAX mATX Motherboard
TP-Link 300Mbps Wirelss N PCI Adapter
MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus XS OC 6144mb GPU
16gb RAM
1TB M.2 2280 SSD
CoolerMaster MasterBox Q300L Micro ATX Case
RM650 650W 80Plus Gold Modular PSU

Edited by Hudson1984 on Monday 19th August 11:49

[snuffy]

Wifi 6, well, what's on the other end?

[mmm-five]

Can you list the current specs and where you feel it's 'slowing down'?

Is that 1TB drive your only drive? What type of drive is it (HDD, SATA SSD, NVMe m.2 SSD)? Is it almost full? Have you ever done a clean install of Windows.

Depending on your answers, you could be looking at anywhere from £50 (wifi6/7 card) to £1000 (new CPU, motherboard, RAM, SSD, etc.).

[Hudson1984]

mmm-five said:

Can you list the current specs and where you feel it's 'slowing down'?

Is that 1TB drive your only drive? What type of drive is it (HDD, SATA SSD, NVMe m.2 SSD)? Is it almost full? Have you ever done a clean install of Windows.

Depending on your answers, you could be looking at anywhere from £50 (wifi6/7 card) to £1000 (new CPU, motherboard, RAM, SSD, etc.).

m.2 drive, yep it's the only drive on there.
no not done a full clean install as yet.

mainly internet lag is my biggest bug bare at the moment, loading a page goes from waiting to full speed back to waiting, makes things like teams calls very glitchy - which mainly i'll improve with better connectivity of course.

In terms of other speeds, it does now struggle with larger spreadsheets and processing of 3d printer files i.e. when i'm running a slice programme this feels to be taking longer than it used to, which is what i'd most like to fix.

[ARHarh]

You should not have lag on the internet with that spec.

Try a lan cable back to the router first, if that improves things sort out the wifi or run a cable.

[mmm-five]

Hudson1984 said:

at the moment I'm running:

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Six Core 4.2GHz (Socket AM4)
MSI B450M Mortar MAX mATX Motherboard
TP-Link 300Mbps Wirelss N PCI Adapter
MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus XS OC 6144mb GPU
16gb RAM
1TB M.2 2280 SSD
CoolerMaster MasterBox Q300L Micro ATX Case
RM650 650W 80Plus Gold Modular PSU

The wifi card/adapter (is it USB or in a slot on the motherboard) is Wifi 4, so if your router supports faster, newer wifi standards, and your connection is fast enough, you should see a throughput increase.

For the stuff you say you're doing, I don't see anything that really needs upgrading, but you could upgrade the CPU to an Zen 3 5xxx model (or get a beefier Zen 2 3xxx one)...but as I said, there's nothing in your usage that seems to suggest an upgrade is required. If you do go to Zen 3, then a motherboard BIOS update might be required before you do so (it might not even boot if you don't do this before swapping).

You may just need to get a second drive for storage and trim down your Windows drive so that it just has the OS and Apps...keeping everything else on the second drive (or a cloud service).

Depending on whether your 3D slicing software is faster on a higher clock single core, or scales with more cores will dictate whether a 5600X, 5800X, or 5900X would be of more benefit.

Edited by mmm-five on Monday 19th August 12:06

[Hudson1984]

mmm-five said:

The wifi card/adapter (is it USB or in a slot on the motherboard) is Wifi 4, so if your router supports faster, newer wifi standards, and your connection is fast enough, you should see a throughput increase.

For the stuff you say you're doing, I don't see anything that really needs upgrading, but you could upgrade the CPU to an Zen 3 5xxx model (or get a beefier Zen 2 3xxx one)...but as I said, there's nothing in your usage that seems to suggest an upgrade is required. If you do go to Zen 3, then a motherboard BIOS update might be required before you do so (it might not even boot if you don't do this before swapping).

You may just need to get a second drive for storage and trim down your Windows drive so that it just has the OS and Apps...keeping everything else on the second drive (or a cloud service).

i've got full fibre, but having an argument with them at the moment as i've dropped from 900mb to 150mb in the last week so that's equally not helping.

the adapter is motherboard mounted, so i've been looking at upgrading it to a wifi 6 card to see if I can maximise signal strength.

I think i'll go for that - another storage drive, and uprated wifi card.

[xeny]

Hudson1984 said:

i've got full fibre, but having an argument with them at the moment as i've dropped from 900mb to 150mb in the last week so that's equally not helping. .

Web pages and teams calls over 150 Mbit should still be fine - it may be worth looking at the WiFi situation in general - there's no chance it has dropped back to a 2.4GHz connection or something similar is there?

[Hudson1984]

xeny said:

Web pages and teams calls over 150 Mbit should still be fine - it may be worth looking at the WiFi situation in general - there's no chance it has dropped back to a 2.4GHz connection or something similar is there?

god knows honestly.

I've been getting ratty with talk talk in general!

sitting in the lounge on the laptop at the moment, wifi speed is currently 180mb/s out in the office it's down to 50.

I've got TP link PX50 nodes between here and there doing both powerline and wifi based mesh. So I can't see why i'm dropping so much....and of course, 150mb is a hell of a lot lower than 900 that I pay for!

They just keep insisting I put the Eero router back on (which I've refused as it's bloody naff) and I keep moaning saying i've had 900mb for the past 8 months why should it change now. It simply isn't the router. But i'm at a loss really

[Griffith4ever]

Hudson1984 said:

xeny said:

Web pages and teams calls over 150 Mbit should still be fine - it may be worth looking at the WiFi situation in general - there's no chance it has dropped back to a 2.4GHz connection or something similar is there?

god knows honestly.

I've been getting ratty with talk talk in general!

sitting in the lounge on the laptop at the moment, wifi speed is currently 180mb/s out in the office it's down to 50.

I've got TP link PX50 nodes between here and there doing both powerline and wifi based mesh. So I can't see why i'm dropping so much....and of course, 150mb is a hell of a lot lower than 900 that I pay for!

They just keep insisting I put the Eero router back on (which I've refused as it's bloody naff) and I keep moaning saying i've had 900mb for the past 8 months why should it change now. It simply isn't the router. But i'm at a loss really

Just plug the ISPs router back in, call them, diagnose, unplug it, put yours back. That's what I had to do with Voda boradband. They just blamed my router if theres was not in use. It's much easier just to play ball with them on this front.

[grumbledoak]

I can't see why you would need to upgrade that if you are not gaming.

Maybe try a USB WiFi dongle? I've always found them better than onboard or PCI card...

If you want to upgrade it, obviously, just tell us the budget and we can all have fun spending it!

[BlueMR2]

https://samknows.com/realspeed/

Try this on different devices, see if its a problem inside or outside.

Also wireless has loads of factors that can cause problems.

Do you have neighbours very close by?

Always wire in where possible.

[Condi]

Hudson1984 said:

at the moment I'm running:

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Six Core 4.2GHz (Socket AM4)
MSI B450M Mortar MAX mATX Motherboard
TP-Link 300Mbps Wirelss N PCI Adapter
MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus XS OC 6144mb GPU
16gb RAM
1TB M.2 2280 SSD
CoolerMaster MasterBox Q300L Micro ATX Case
RM650 650W 80Plus Gold Modular PSU

My PC was very similar spec, also built 2020. It now has 32GB RAM and a 250GB SSD boot drive on top of that and will still play the latest games in reasonable resolution.

There is no way any part of that build is responsible for slow web page loading unless you've got a hardware fault. I would check all your drives, BIOS updates etc. The motherboard has had several BIOS updates since it was new, and loads of other bits of HW might have new drivers out. Then plug the PC directly into the router and see what internet speed you get. It is more likely (IMO) to be a software issue than a HW issue, and so a clean install of windows would be the best way to go.

[Hudson1984]

so slight plot twist today...

stuck an older laptop on the ethernet directly on the main router. 700mb download.
newer laptop doesn't have ethernet, but it's still sitting at around 200mb max.

newer one was on 2.4Ghz, so got it on the 5Ghz channel and we're pushing 250 ish at best.

wifi on older one sitting happily at 500mb

older wifi is on 802.11ac protocol, newer is on Wifi 5 I'll see what the PC is doing later, but i'll likely need to upgrade that to wifi 6 to get the best out of it anyway with the distances from main router.

[paulrockliffe]

I read through the thread and saw this plot twist coming, all the signs point to an issue with your WiFi connection between the machine the router.

If you don't have an ethernet connection on your laptop, you will have the option to connect a USB to ethernet adaptor, or use a dock to hook up your monitor, keyboard etc and wire ethernet into that.

If you can run a wire you can fix this problem for buttons compared with changing the WiFi card, but at the same time I would probably just do that as well if you can just to cover the future circumstance where this comes up again and you've forgotten why you have the cable. And I would consider a proper multi-access point WiFi setup, all wired together, before upgrading your PC because, storage aside, it doesn't sound like you really have a problem there, and sorting the WiFi 100% will avoid this problem for other devices too.

[Hudson1984]

paulrockliffe said:

I read through the thread and saw this plot twist coming, all the signs point to an issue with your WiFi connection between the machine the router.

If you don't have an ethernet connection on your laptop, you will have the option to connect a USB to ethernet adaptor, or use a dock to hook up your monitor, keyboard etc and wire ethernet into that.

If you can run a wire you can fix this problem for buttons compared with changing the WiFi card, but at the same time I would probably just do that as well if you can just to cover the future circumstance where this comes up again and you've forgotten why you have the cable. And I would consider a proper multi-access point WiFi setup, all wired together, before upgrading your PC because, storage aside, it doesn't sound like you really have a problem there, and sorting the WiFi 100% will avoid this problem for other devices too.

yeah think you're right. It does seem all my issues are wifi related really. Perhaps adding some more storage on the main PC but that's a simple fix in all reality.

USB to ethernet is interesting, I only really use the laptop when i'm in the lounge so can easily wire it to the router so that's a nice fix cheers.

so... let's get onto your other point.

Multi-access point WiFi setup. Talk me through that, what do I need to do?

or am I simply better off running a cat 6 from my lounge, round the house and into a mesh node in the office?

Edited by Hudson1984 on Thursday 22 August 10:58

[snuffy]

Hudson1984 said:

or am I simply better off running a cat 6 from my lounge, round the house and into a mesh node in the office?

I assume your lounge is where your router is ?

If so, then if you are going to run an ethernet cable from your router to your office, why not just plug it into your PC ?

I have a 1 GB connection, and that's what I do. This now is often a problem, i.e. the incoming internet connection is now faster than your wifi.

[Hudson1984]

snuffy said:

I assume your lounge is where your router is ?

If so, then if you are going to run an ethernet cable from your router to your office, why not just plug it into your PC ?

I have a 1 GB connection, and that's what I do. This now is often a problem, i.e. the incoming internet connection is now faster than your wifi.

Mainly getting the cable to the desk lol, other than that not a great deal.

My thoughts are to run the cable into the office, then directly into another mesh node and hope that improves things.

I've ordered some cat 6 and going to do 2 tests.

Test 1: run the cable direct into the PC and test speed.
Test 2: run the cable into the node and test speed on PC

If Test 2 is ok I'll go with that as my solution, if not, I'll have to do as you suggest and run the cable round to the desk. Which isn't the end of the world just a bit untidier than I was hoping for.

I think hand on heart Test 1 is likely to be what i'm going to have to do but i'd hope Test 2 to be sufficient as I run other things in the office and would really like a good wifi system working in there

[paulrockliffe]

There's loads of threads on multiple access point stuff on here. I deliberately didn't say mesh, because that is where you have devices using WiFi to talk to each other to extend the WiFi network, you really want those devices hard-wired together.

I'm not the best person to advise because I bought a load of the Google WiFi pucks about 6 years ago and haven't needed to think about it since, so I'm not up to speed with what's best etc. How that works though is you have one puck plugged into your internet connection, then the others can be either wireless or wired via switches and they all talk to the main node. If a device doesn't have a very good connection to a puck, but a better connection is available from a different puck then the device gets booted and reconnects to the better connection.

The main benefit is that you don't really need to wire in devices, everything can have a fast WiFi connection because it can always see a decent puck to talk to. While it is pretty much always going to be faster in principle to wire the devices directly, it's rare that in practice the device needs the full speed that a good WiFi network will give it. You gain the flexibility to have any device work really well anywhere without having to give any thought to any of this again.

It's true that you can easily have a faster internet connection than the WiFi connection now, but it's also true that you'll struggle to find anyone to pipe data to you that fast anyway and also that if they did your bottleneck isn't going to really matter. If you have a server you'll more likely benefit if you're transferring files to and from that entirely locally so then it makes sense to prioritise wiring those things, but mileage will vary hugely as to whether it makes a practical difference.

[snuffy]

Hudson1984 said:

If Test 2 is ok I'll go with that as my solution, if not, I'll have to do as you suggest and run the cable round to the desk. Which isn't the end of the world just a bit untidier than I was hoping for.

Mine starts at the router (obviously), then through the wall in my lounge (handy hole where the satellite cable used to come in), up the outside of the house, through another hole in the wall (handily made by the previous owner for a phone extension cable), then inside my loft, under the insulation/boarding, through another hole in the ceiling in my office (by the door), then down inside some trunking I fitted, along the bottom of the wall (inside trunking) and finally into the back of my PC!

The really odd thing was I bought a very long pre-made cat 6 cable, cut one end off (to get it through the various holes in the walls etc), and then remade the one end. But it refused to connect at 1GB, only at 100MB. I must have remade the end a donze times, used a cable tester, the lot. But still only 100MB. Then I bought one of those connectors where it has a pre-made ethernet plug on one end and punch-down connectors on the other end. And amazingly that works at 1GB.

There was no way I was paying for 1GB and not getting it to my office PC. It took me ages to get it sorted, including having next door up a ladder, feeding the cable around the place. He's better up a ladder than me !