Is your motherboard limiting performance?
Is your motherboard limiting performance?
I recently replaced the computer of my aunt. She had a Pentium E2140 (2x1.6GHz), and I installed an E8400 (2x3GHz). The RAM was upgraded from 1 to 4GB at 800MHz, but performance didn’t improve much. I suspected the issue was due to the motherboard’s connector size—only a 20-pin instead of the standard 24. When installing Windows 10 on a V300 SSD from Kingston, the installation took years. It wasn’t the flash drive, as it worked fine on other systems. The port was USB 2.0, and the speed increase was minimal. I blamed the 20-pin connector. Recently, my friend gave me a free AM3 motherboard since I needed one after her previous one failed. She offered an AM2/AM2+/AM3 board with an Athlon 64 X2 5600+, which I swapped in for the Phenom X4 955. The installer still took years to load. Could this be related to the thermal design power (TDP) or lack of support for these processors?
These CPUs are really disappointing. A Phenom X6 1035T on a solid board stock reaches 338 points on CBR15, matching performance to an i3 4170—another outdated chip with only a third of the cores. Even now, the i3 4130 is seen as low-end for basic tasks like web browsing and YouTube videos, nearly twice as slow as an e8400. I owned one before about three years ago; it was extremely poor, barely handling web browsing or 480p YouTube at all, often buffering and dropping frames at 720p.
You're asking about what exactly happens when loading the installer. Are you starting from a USB drive? Or are you trying to run Windows inside another Windows version? If you're using a USB, where does the installation process stop? Is it before you reach the main screen?
I own an A8-6600K that's quite similar to the X4 955. It runs smoothly in Windows 10 and has worked well for over five years since I upgraded. It doesn't have a powerful CPU, but it handles browsing and everyday tasks without any lag. Even at 4K resolution, I haven’t seen any stuttering because the media was processed using the hardware GPU. The system feels responsive thanks to the SSD. While it's quite basic, it provides a decent experience. The E8400 chip seems to make things even less appealing.
The processor handles browsing perfectly fine. I’m running a 10-year-old laptop with eight tabs and YouTube playing, plus another Chrome window open. The focus should be on how quickly Windows installs take, not just speed.