Help me improve my dual core's performance

[Schmuckley]

You can OC that chip..
Set 350 FSB in BIOS..raise NB voltage a notch..term voltage a notch..Vcore a notch..
(The board does not go past 350 FSB)
You may have to lower the RAM strap.

 

[Vayra86]

Have you even "used" a SSD?

SSDs are used as Primary drives, primarily as Windows Boot drives because they can speed up the Windows load times tremendously and makes the system so much more responsive. Remember when RAM is in limited capacity and Windows need to frequently page them to the HDD and the system "freezes" at this stage? The solution is to increase the RAM capacity! Similarly, having an SSD for the Windows partition is like loading Windows from RAM instead of from a magnetic disk.

SSDs are extremely relevant these days because their prices have dropped so much that every new system should have a SSD for the Windows partition. Even a 120GB SSD will do wonders! For a several years old system, adding a SSD and migrating Windows to this drive will do more good than most other upgrades.

Yes, HDD are fine, but that's because they are very cheap for TBs of capacity. Hence, HDD is usually the only option when you need massive capacity for the lowest cost, and speed is not the primary requirement. Unless your money grows on trees, no one will install a 2TB SSD just to see their games load 10s faster ...

Thus, the best solution is to have a SSD as a Windows Boot drive and HDD(s) to store your data, photos, videos, games, etc.

Best regards,

Nelson Ng Yeng Wai
(Singapore)

Of course, I have two 256gb SSD's in my system, OS/Gaming drives.

But on a tight budget, and considering the much lower amount of GB/dollar of all SSD's, it is not something that is 'the first thing to upgrade' and most certainly not something that is similar to upgrading RAM from 'insufficient' to 'sufficient'. You are referring to cache and page file data, and this is of course faster off an SSD but the differences are negligible as those things all start coming into play on faster systems. The main advantage of an SSD is boot up and response time, neither of which are primary concerns when you have a vastly underpowered rig and are looking at cheap ways to improve that. The bottleneck in this situation is elsewhere.

Besides, for actual constant workloads like gaming, an SSD does little to nothing except maybe speed up a load time here and there. It is in no way a performance booster, it just reduces a data access bottleneck.