Can anyone recommend a very good hard disk and DDR2 RAM that can achieve 5.9 rating (or better in the future) in Windows Experience Index? Sorry to say this as I am not quite good at choossing hardware. Please provide the brand and the price.

Can we use solid state drive in the desktop? Will it faster than the hard disk? Can the solid state drive achieve 5.9 rating too? Thanks for the help.

hard disk: Western Digital WD6400AAKS

As for memory, look at this thread.

But honestly... who gives a crap about WEI?

Most decent SATA HDs will give you 5.9 or very close to it.
RAM wise, even 2GB of plain old 800MHz DDR2 (CL5) gets 5.9, so basically anything decent you can buy will get that.


Yeah, it doesn't mean a whole lot. I get 5.9 on RAM and disk, and 5.7 on CPU (you likely need a quad core to get 5.9 there), but then my vid card (a totally 1337 GeForce 8500GT that's overkill for my needs) brings my overall score down to 5.0 (it gets 5.0 on "desktop performence for aero"), but Vista is really fast regardless. I fail to see how a power hungry gamer's video card I have no need for would make things any faster.

RAM and disk aren't your issue if you want a 5.9 score (not that it makes any difference) but rather CPU and vid card.

I get 5.9 on all categories except CPU which I get 5.8. The secret to most of the score are determined by a few factors that most of the time transform into no real world indicator of the benefits of each type of part.

Processor: Quad core won't necessarily get you to the top because the processor speed and the amount of cache plays a big role here as well. That's why even with a simple E8400 that's overclocked I can still achieve 5.8 even if it's just a dual core processor. This is, however, the age old argument between dual core vs quad core. Quad core is only better if the speed is close to that of the dual core when compared.

Memory: Just like when talking the number of cores vs speed when talking about processors, memory is not only influenced by speed. Timings and the CPU / Memory ratio also have a big role here as they increase the maximum bandwidth running at the same speed.

Graphics: The GPU clock speed ways in a more then the number of stream processor units in this score.

Gaming graphics: Number of stream processor units are just as important as the GPU's clock speed. Same arguments as above regarding memory and processors.

Primary hard disk: RAID can help a lot here as this score mostly based on data transfer rates, large hard drive caches can also help with burst speeds.

Well, quad cores usually don't have tiny caches (they're not low end CPUs). I've never seen any dual core reach 5.9, even OC'ed. But with quad cores, it's pretty common. A "basic" quad core like the Q6600 will get 5.9, the main reason they can get that extra .1 is that they encode windows media faster (it's part of the CPU benchmark).

But yeah, it doesn't seem to reflect real life performance much.

Thanks for the tips, guys. If you have two hard disks or more, how will the Windows Experience Index be calculated? Is it just based on slowest hard disk?

Can we use solid state drive in the desktop yet?

My 2 GB of 800MHz DDR2 just scores 5.5 while Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 500-GB Hard Drive scores 5.7. So, hopefully, I can increase these scores.

This post has been edited by alvinkhorfire: Jul 27 2008, 11:26 AM

The hard drive score is based on the drive containing the System partition only.