Hands on: Is it time to upgrade your hardware?

Lynnfield is expected to be followed by Havendale in the second half of next year, which uses further integration of the graphics into the main core.

So, if you’re thinking of upgrading some aspect of an existing PC, the question is whether to wait for a Nehalem motherboard and processor (and hopefully re-use any DDR-3 memory you might have), or stick with your existing motherboard and identify the aspects that can be updated.

As with all upgrades, it’s also worth thinking about where your existing bottlenecks lie and addressing them specifically, rather than just upgrading a component simply because you can.

A while back I identified Ram as the weak point in my own system, so I invested in what seemed a significant amount of memory at the time.

Exploiting 64-bit Microsoft Windows Vista’s capability of addressing more than 4GB of Ram, I complemented my existing pair of 1GB modules with a pair of 2GB Dimms, taking the total system memory to 6GB. Handling multiple large images in Adobe Photoshop never felt quicker.

Over the past year, though, my focus has shifted from processing still to motion pictures, with video editing placing the greatest demands on my PC. Rendering or converting videos can see my processor maxed-out at 100 per cent for several minutes at a time, and a recent switch to filming high-definition video has only made matters worse.

Greater processing muscle is obviously the key, and like most people, I had to decide whether to wait for Nehalem or make a final upgrade to my existing platform. If my earlier memory investment had been in DDR-3, I’d probably have waited, but wanting to get more use from all that DDR-2, I opted to fit the fastest processor I could in my motherboard.

The system
My main work PC is based around an Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard with a Core 2 Duo E6700 processor and 6GB of DDR-2 memory. This motherboard has been around for some time, and when I first bought it, my processor was a single-core Pentium 4.

I was pleased it had successfully handled the transition to the Core 2 Duo 65nm technology 22 months ago and wondered how much further it could go.