Basic upgrades to a work PC - from MS Office to a bit of graphic design work

[Chazzer3]

Hi all,

I have the opportunity to do a little upgrade to a work PC which has basically only been used for MS Office and web browsing/email etc.

It has an i3-8100, 1x 8GB stick of DDR4 2400 RAM and a SATA SSD. This has been fine although occasionally can get a little slow.

The PC is now running Affinity publisher and designer more often which tends to slow it down (I am getting complaints anyway!). I would usually just upgrade the RAM but I am also considering whether it's worth doing more:

• replace i3-8100 with an i7-8700 - 50% more cores, 3x threads - used seems to be possible to get one for ~£100-150 used depending on ebay luck
• get a new 2666MHz 2x8GB RAM ~£50
• I don't know if a GPU is really necessary or not for the workload, but if it was, probably a passively cooled GT 1030 (<£80)

So if I went all in I think this would bulk out the PC a bit for only £220-270... the PSU has the capacity.

Just wondered if there were any thoughts and also whether affinity would be more CPU or GPU constrained...

Another option to make it cheaper would be to just to the RAM and GPU, but taking load of the integrated graphics, I don't know if that really frees up any CPU power or RAM...? If it did that might be an even better option.

Charlie -

 

[PP Mguire]

Affinity has hardware acceleration. Enable it and watch system resource usage. If GPU is at 100%, upgrade the GPU. If CPU is at 100%, upgrade CPU. Adding another 8GB of RAM would be recommended in either case.

 

[Chazzer3]

Affinity has hardware acceleration. Enable it and watch system resource usage. If GPU is at 100%, upgrade the GPU. If CPU is at 100%, upgrade CPU. Adding another 8GB of RAM would be recommended in either case.

Thanks for your reply - I'll check out what Affinity maxes out and then upgrade accordingly + RAM!

Charlie -