How much needs to be spent for a noticeable PC upgrade & would it be worth it?

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82084984#Comment_82084984

Tbh I actually didn't mention anything. Unless I did & I've since forgotten - because I know I came in to this wondering what I'd need to spend, rather than I'd like to spend £xxx. It was others who mentioned £500-£700 really.

But anyway, the price doesn't change just because it's a laptop. If I can achieve this with £xxx on a desktop PC but a laptop would be more than that then laptop is not an option - as I want to keep cost down, not up.

Fair point on the sizing of the screen though.

I wasn't concerned about battery - I assumed I'd just have to have it connected to mains for a task like that. Not sure if I'd be able to remove the battery & only have it connected to mains (therefore not degrading the battery).

B0bbyEwing

Just had a look at the Shield TV Pro…

£189.99 now on Amazon

I bought mine in July 2022 at £152.99 which was a replacement for the one I bought in October 2021 which turned faulty which cost me £170.58.

With the time that's passed & the way pricing has got silly on just life these days, I would've expected it to have risen more in price tbh.

Cisco001

My recommendation of laptop will be same on this post

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6677784/laptop-advice-good-for-streaming-simple-photo-and-video-editing

But the fact is there is no reason to get laptop unless you need it portable.

And as I said before, the min spending is £200. Then, the max is unlimited.

You need to set a budget.

missile

OP: What performance improvement are you looking for? With your usage I would suggest your current machine should be good enough.

To address your car analogy: I upgraded to an RS3 which does 0-60 in 4.0seconds, more than fast enough for me. I recently upgraded to20GB RAM on my HP Envy Desktop-689LVMH, more than fast enough for me. It does all I want and I don't like the bells and whistles with Windows 11.

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82086273#Comment_82086273

I notice lag with browsing these days. And startup too (yes I have an SSD).

The startup is quite quick but to go from desktop to be able to browse smoothly seems to take a little bit.

If I want to run Handbrake on any movie it'll be 8hrs easy. I don't want to hang too much on Handbrake because once it's done then it's done, I'll have no more files to run through it so it's not like an ongoing job. Plus I could set it up at night for it to run it while I'm in bed. I've no idea how much electricity it'd use on an 8hr job but it wont be as much as a new machine I'd bet.

And then the video editing, again that's occasional. Not daily or even weekly.

So you could well be correct in that my PC may be enough if I was to work with the limitations (e.g. run Handbrake through the night & accept it's 1 movie per day kind of thing rather than a few movies in a day).

booneruk

If I want to run Handbrake on any movie it'll be 8hrs easy. I don't want to hang too much on Handbrake because once it's done then it's done, I'll have no more files to run through it so it's not like an ongoing job. Plus I could set it up at night for it to run it while I'm in bed. I've no idea how much electricity it'd use on an 8hr job but it wont be as much as a new machine I'd bet.

I think you'd be surprised! if you buy the right CPU then it would be a whole load more efficient and hugely faster to boot. I asked my favourite AI (Claude) to compare your Phenom vs a a modern Ryzen 9700x in terms of handbrake performance and efficiency:

So you've got a chip doing ~15-25x the work, in similar or less time, while pulling similar or less power. Joules-per-frame-encoded, the 9700X is very plausibly 20x+ more efficient

(which is around the kind of difference I would have expected - being a PC hardware enthusiast for 30+ years)

forgotmyname

Are you copying from BlueRay to the computer? Or are these download files? You can do tweaks to improving browsing
latency but once you get past a certain level it's all down to the website itself and all the clutter it loads in the background.

Even if a website does not appear to show adverts it maybe tracking you in the background and linking to dozens of webpages
that you do not see. Even this forum links to googletagmanager.com and typekit.net.

Load something like Facebook and the list of junk in the background can be longer than your screen can show without scrolling
and it may not fully show the page until most of that has loaded or sent it's tracking data etc. Faster, CPU and more RAM may
do little for that once you pass a certain level of performance.

What FPS are you getting in Handbrake? Just done a test on an 8.4GB MKV used Handbrake to encode as an MP4 and
from the Synology to the PC it averaged 211FPS, copying that file to the same NVME on the PC increased that to 237FPS
and I even tried converting from the main NVME to the 2nd NVME and it was still 237FPS (average not peak).

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82086476#Comment_82086476

I appreciate it.

Though while you/it says 20x more efficient, what does that mean in measurable numbers?

So instead of being in a smooth state in 5 minutes I'll be in a smooth state in 4 mins?

Instead of running a movie in Handbrake taking 8hrs it'll take 6.5hrs?

I don't know what my PC costs to run so no idea of any comparison there.

In a 6.5hr scenario I'd still need to let it run through the night. Where that could change is more if it brought 8 hours down to 1 or 2 hours.

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82086700#Comment_82086700

the files for handbrake are bluray rips. They've already been done using makemkv & are sitting on a hard drive right now.

I no longer do this as I have other means of obtaining movies. <nomoresaidthere>

Regards FPS, it's been a long while since I actually used Handbrake…simply because of the time it takes. I don't know.

Although I never encoded in to .mp4, always .mkv.

SammyBoyd

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82086764#Comment_82086764

20x is 2000%, not 20%.

Eight hours becomes twenty four minutes.

B0bbyEwing

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82086918#Comment_82086918

Leave me alone, it was 6:32am 😂😂😂