Yay, time for some computer upgrades

[mattr]

Found myself with a bit of spare cash (for once) and I've decided its probably time to give my trusty computer a bit of tender love and care My XP install for studio work is still feeling fresh and running nicely, but my installation of Vista has crawled to a halt so its about time I made a fresh start for that. The base components are about 2 years old and I haven't opened the case to do anything other than remove dust for the past year, which is fairly unusual for me!

I've kind of fallen behind with what's happening in the computer world recently, so basically what would people recommend I look at? So far I've been considering a few things...


Major upgrade? ... I priced up the cost of upgrading to i5 or i7 the other day and it may just be within budget. I read through a few forum threads regarding the i5 processor I was considering, however many suggested that it wouldn't be much of an upgrade over the overclocked Q6600 I already have. I would probably see some performance gains with i7, but is it justified by the £800 or so that it would cost me? Would I be better off waiting another few months for prices to drop? Has anyone else upgraded from a decent spec Q6600 system and seen massive performance increases?

If so, any recommendations for motherboards that are known to work well / have TI firewire chipsets / etc?



SSD upgrade? ... I could save a chunk of money for an upgrade a few months down the line and grab a 64gb SSD to use as a system drive. I purchased Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) today whilst it was still on the £30 student offer, but I'd rather put it on a brand new drive than have to find space and move partitions on my existing 2TB of drives! Not as exciting as a major upgrade, but would still spruce up the performance of my computer. I've been holding off on an SSD for ages and the prices are really dropping now, so has the time come to take the plunge?

If so, any recommendations for SSDs that would noticeably outperform my current hard drive but not break the bank?



...or I could stick with getting a new hard drive (probably yet another 500gb Spinpoint F1) to put Windows 7 on. Not so exciting. Meh

 

[Bristol Posse]

SSDs
Meh... I have a hard raided array on my gaming rig and holy cow but on an audio PC I wouldn't waste the Money unless the 3 seconds you save in boot time is really important to you and for recording write speeds they are ofthen on par or slower than 7200rpm WD Caviars unless you get into the crazy money range of the super extreme intel SSDs

i7
Meh... if your Q6600 is the choke point holding you back which I seriously doubt then sure, It's a nice CPU although nothing uses it's potential yet. I built a rig to see what an i7 975 could do and sure it's fast but with my projects usually running 18-26 tracks there was no improvement over my Q9550 since that wan't even close to maxing out anyway. It's not like the reverbs run faster or sound better with the exta processing overhead.

I like windows 7 a lot, Personally I run in 32 bit because a lot of my VSTs do and I don't like the WOW 32 bit emulation on top of the 64 bit OS as it does slow things down
I would get a new HDD and load up windows 7 and transition all of your vista stuff over. It's basically the same OS without all the bloating and stuff to drag it down so pretty much everything will work. Save the rest of the money for something that will actually make a diffference to your music.