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Matfinn

Hi

I got a new Geforce 6800 recently. Its AGP. When I run battlefield 2 on it with 4x AA and a resolution of 1024 * 768 with high detail the game runs fine most of the time, except in some situations where there is alot of things going on. Performance is dragged to the floor and today the it crashed. I don't have the card overclocked or any other hardware.

My question is, would I be right in assuming that the motherboard and CPU may be the bottleneck in this situation ? Here is my hardware

AMD athlon XP 2800+
1gb pc 3200 ddr ram
Abit NS7-s 2.0

That hardware is over 2 years old now. Im thinking, if I got an upgrade to an athlon 64 processor, like this one (D Athlon 64 3700+ 2.2GHz Socket 939, 1MB, BOXED w/fan), would I see a major performace boost over my athlon XP ? I could use the same memory I have in my current machine. I would also get a new motherboard, like this one (Abit AV8, K8T800 PRO, Socket-939, ATX SATA,GbLAN, Firewire, DDR, Sound, AGP8X).

Any opinions or ideas ?

Matfinn

anyone ?

aidan_walsh

Do you really need the graphics cranked up that high? What sort of difference does turning the AA down to x2 make (if you can do that)?

ShiverinEskimo

I'd do without AA if I were you - its nice and all but it even the most powerful cards get bogged down with a lot of screen activity. Turn it on, marvel at its niceness, turn it off, play for 1 hour, forget abotu AA and enjoy your game.

Maybe diable AA but up the res a bit and reap some benefit.

Matfinn

AA uses up loads of CPU horsepower so ? I disabled it and things seem to be running better. Is an Athlon XP adequete then ?

ShiverinEskimo

Aye, nothing wrong with it but its like any other component - there's always better. Have you thought about a small overclock? Stock fan should hold up fine. Just squeeze 1 or 2 hundred more mgz out of it - very easily done.