| Graphics | ATI Radeon HD 4250 | 4.5 |
| Gaming graphics | 3323 MB Total available graphics memory | 5.4 |
Anyway I got all 7 + with the only exception being my drives.. which I would need to upgrade to a solid state before that will move.
First off, don't get to hung up on the Windows Experience Rating it really doesn't give you much help. Secondly, the figures you have for the GPU seem about right for an on-board graphics solution.
The thing to consider is what do you want from your PC? If it is working fine and doing all of the things that you want it to do is there any point in throwing money at it? Or, do you just want some BIG figures to give you bragging rights with your mates?
Adding a dedicated Graphic Card would improve your WE score but, will you actually gain anything from this except a hole in your pocket where the money used to be? If you do add a GPU you would actually do better to disable the On-board Graphics as the WE rating is based on the lowest score and, even if you put it in crossfire, that score won't improve.
I got the same scores..
What really got me was the score on the Memory..
But I ended up getting a HIS 5670 and turned off the build in graphics..
Not just for better graphics performance but I didn't want to loose half a gig for the shared memory too..
Anyway back to my point.. as soon as I did this my Memory score jumped..
Now I know this is more of an Index then an actual speed/performance test.. but still..
Anyway I got all 7 + with the only exception being my drives.. which I would need to upgrade to a solid state before that will move.
A dedicated Graphics Card will give you better results, as you would expect and yes, I did notice an improvement over using an on-board Graphics chip.
You can buy one of the 5 series ATI Graphics Cards quite cheap these days and most of these will give you good results and DirectX 11 too. A 5450 can be picked up for under £40 so they don't really break the bank either.
That's the problem the WEI is more of a nuisance than it was meant to be and half the time I think it just guesses the rating from the details of the hardware not actual testing. It is definitely not accurate by any stretch of the imagination. ::)
Sure its accurate! It accurately measures nothing!
That's interesting! So the shared memory caused normal RAM operations to be slower? I have 8gb of RAM, so I didn't mind the sharing yet, but if that's throttling everything else I definitely need to reconsider.
Not sure what it is with 5.9s on disk. I get the same with RAID1 (fast disks, but still SATA2), which certainly ought to be less than the RAID0/SATA3 setup absic mentioned. I gotta run some actual benchmarks on that, to see where it's really shaking out.
Anyway I got all 7 + with the only exception being my drives.. which I would need to upgrade to a solid state before that will move.
That's the same scenario for me. Even WD SATA3 HDD's didn't improve the WE score above 5.9 Funny thing is, even in a RAID0 array the HDD score didn't go above 5.9 in the WE which I really did think would be different especially as I am getting above 200MB/S Read and over 160MB/s Write speeds with the RAID0 Array.
Way to go. :D
Maybe I should look at putting a RAID10 Array together! :P
But with the cost of getting enough Hard drives to make such an array I think I would probably go for an SSD for the increased speed, which is all I would be after, as it would use less power. ;)
I was thinking of picking up a new USB3 external enclosure, and the above has me questioning if that'll be a bit of a marketing mirage as well.
I got my four (Samsung F3 HD103SJ) for $54 ea, which puts them at just about the cost of a nice sized boot SSD. So now I have 2TB of redundant storage for photos and music, that just happens to scream.