What Should I Upgrade?

D

Dr_Faulk

Geek Trainee
My computer is respectable. Middle of the road, I would say, in terms of performance. However, I'm a gamer, and there's a bottle-neck somewhere, and I need help in defining it:

Biostar Motherboard: U8568Pro, VIA P4X266E Chipset, 2.4Ghz P4.
Standard 7200 RPM 80 gig HD, nowhere near full.
4x AGP with a 8x AGP Radeon 9800Pro (128).
512 RAM (SD RAM, 133Mhz).

Now, from photoshop and video rendering, I believe my CPU is fast enough. Loading times are alright, also. My biggest problem is in the framerate. I've been told that the diff. between 8x and 4x AGP is almost unnoticeable, which is a big relief, because I was worried that I'd have to upgrade my motherboard to one with 8x AGP.

I can't help but think that upgrading from 512 SD ram to 1 Gig DDR (266Mhz) RAM will make a big difference, especially for games. (I'm a big CS junkie, and my frame rate is consistently hovering below 30fps at the best of times, even though performance is set to optimum. Battle Field 2 was definitely unplayable, even on the lowest graphical setting, at which point it looked like an N64 game... I put it down to lazy programming).

Any suggestions? Should I boost my RAM or will it not make a jot of difference?

many thanks!
 
Ok, its a decent system but not good enough for smooth gaming for BF2.
Your problem will be partly down to 4x AGP with an 8x card, the 9800pro is still a decent card, but new games require more grunt and your cutting performance even further by not allowing it all the bandwidth it should have.

I would get a new motherboard, and get some DDR RAM, considerably better than SD-RAM. You CPU isn't ideal for gaming but thats not the bottleneck here.
 
The bottle neck is your ram. I play HL2 and have a pretty good setup but it's speratically laggy when I bump things up too high. This is because I have 512Mb's or ram. If you buy a gig or DDR ram like Addis suggested you should notice a good improvement. AGP 8x would help but it wouldn't be worth a new motherboard just for that as the difference isn't huge, unless you were planning on upgrading that too. Your processor has some life left in it but a little overclocking would be nice once you get the new ram:)
 
Thanksalicious!

As great as everyone says BF2 is, CS is my baby. I'd buy 1 gig of 266Mhz DDR RAM for €120 just to have it run a bit smoother. I'm not going to upgrade the machine anymore than that because (a) I'm a poor, (b) it's kinda office property and if I mess it up I'm in trouble, (c) if I'm going to upgrade the motherboard and processor I might as well buy a whole new system.

€1300 for a maxed-out games PC or €500 for a PS3 with blue-ray capabilities. Hmmm....
 
id get the pc

you'd need at least an Xp 3k in my opinion to run BF2, you can build a system with 1300$ with an athlon 64 venice or sD, with an n4ultra board, it'd be pretty good.

I'd recommend this for a cheap (to new boards), and good mobo that was one point lower in Pcworlds Worldbench tests than an A8N SLI Deluxe and K8T Neo4 SLI, and its awesome at oc'ing from what I've heard

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813123236
 
Yeah I've heard they were awesome overclockers. Nice dude. But I don't think he wanted to pay that much, he seems to be leaning towards a PS3, whenever that comes out.
 
Who knows. I don't like Sony's console efforts. Rather, I hate what they've done to the videogame market as a whole. They have made it more mainstream, but I believe they've done the most damage in forcing developers to rush games out, which has left us with the 1,000's of mediocre titles.

As soon as I get a full time job, my PC is getting a whole lot of lovin'. Thanks for the advice, guys. I'll go for the RAM. It'll help with everything. =)
 
Yea there is no question that I would take a PC over a PS3. I would take a $300 PC before a $400 PS3. I can't stand console games, there is absolutely no comparason to a PC game. My stand, theyre both comparable to card games-console=Pokemon whereas PC=Poker
 
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