Whats needed to improve game loading times ?

NeVeR

I'm getting back in gaming and want to build a nice PC for under €500 (dont need monitor)

At the moment while playing on and offline the load times are long... some online Call of Duty maps can take me up to 1 minute to load.. and i know there's many other players already playing before i get in... I have a 10MB connection so I dont think it's that

At the moment I have dual core AMD 4200 with 2 gig ram.. Also a nice 512MB graphics card.

What should i get getting to improve game loading times.. or is it just the norm to have to wait..

Even offline it would take a while to load up.

Is €500 to little for a nice gaming PC ?

cheers

Solitaire

€500 gets you something better than an old X2-4200+... so long as you don't need an OS, or a monitor, or peripherals. If you do it all goes to hell - fast. What's the graphics card in there anyway?

And as €500 doesn't get you an SSD your best bet for faster loading times is:

1. Stay away from slow 5400rpm HDDs
2. Defrag after every game/big app/mod install
3. Avoid Vista :P

Also, if part of the problem is slow custom map streaming then even if you have a good connection the client may not be so well endowed... or your/their/someone's ISP is playing silly-beggars :rolleyes:

NeVeR

I have monitor.. and i dont need OS,,, was thinkning going with Windows 7 .. any good ?

The card i have is Radeon HD 3870 "PCS" 512MB,

Also there is already a 500Watt PSU in my current build.

What would you get ?

uberpixie

NeVeR wrote: »

I have monitor.. and i dont need OS,,, was thinkning going with Windows 7 .. any good ?

The card i have is Radeon HD 3870 "PCS" 512MB,

Also there is already a 500Watt PSU in my current build.

What would you get ?

What brand PSU? (not all 500W pus are 'real' 500W psus.....)
What case do you have?

I am currently using windows 7 atm and so far it is treating me well. Def it is what vista should have been.

jonny72

NeVeR wrote: »

I'm getting back in gaming and want to build a nice PC for under €500 (dont need monitor)

At the moment while playing on and offline the load times are long... some online Call of Duty maps can take me up to 1 minute to load.. and i know there's many other players already playing before i get in... I have a 10MB connection so I dont think it's that

At the moment I have dual core AMD 4200 with 2 gig ram.. Also a nice 512MB graphics card.

What should i get getting to improve game loading times.. or is it just the norm to have to wait..

Even offline it would take a while to load up.

Is €500 to little for a nice gaming PC ?

cheers

Your processor and graphics card aren't that bad, they will run most games quite well (not on ultra high settings of course), they shouldn't be slowing the loading time of a game by very much at all.

What size is your harddrive? is it nearly full? have you run a good defrag on it recently? How long does your bootup into windows take? hit ctrl-alt-delete, how many processes are running?

The solution could be that your PC is crapped up with spyware, almost full, your swapfile is messed up, very defragmented - any one of a myriad of small software problems that are easily fixed.

First solution - get the latest version of windowscare (its free) from download.com and defrag the hdd and clean the registry and optimise and all that..

Or you could do a windows reinstall..

then

if all that isn't working, then you should look into upgrading your PC with perhaps new motherboard, quad processor and samsung F3 harddrive

BadCharlie

You could also look into buying a new harddrive (and only put your games on it). Some of the new ones are very fast at loading games. I have all my games on a Samsung F1 1TB harddrive which loads games quick. But you could do even better by going raptor or even just putting two drives in a raid configuration.

My brother has his games on some 5400rpm drive with poor Data Transfer Rate & low Buffer Size on his drive and i notice a big difference in load times from our two machines. We play a-lot of lan games and i can be waiting for him to get into the game for sometime. For internet games i will not be the first person in the server but i wont be far off it (normally 3 or 4 people in before me)

Solitaire

€500 gets a nice lil' gaming PC but so long as your monitor is no higher than 1280*1024 I'd say all you need right now is a nice CHKDSK+defrag session

Assuming no recycling you'd probably get a nice lil' X3-435/AM3/4GB DDR3-1333/HD5750 rig out of the pot but if the case and PSU were of good design and condition and you recycled them and the DVD burner and other semi-consumables to boot you could just about squeeze an i5-750 out of €500 (on eBuyer at least). Then just OC the HD5750 a bit and pretend you really bought a HD5770

Anti

there is a interesting thread in the komplett forum regarding sub 500quid pc's. You could just remove the parts you dont need from the builds, and upgrade the bits that are there. Some guy managed a SLI and crossfire rig for under 500. And another managed a full pc including monitor, keyboard mouse, webcam and all that for under the 500 mark.

NeVeR

uberpixie wrote: »

What brand PSU? (not all 500W pus are 'real' 500W psus.....)
What case do you have?

I am currently using windows 7 atm and so far it is treating me well. Def it is what vista should have been.

it's a NorthQ. Case is nothing really I'll have to get a new one.

jonny72 wrote: »

What size is your harddrive? is it nearly full? have you run a good defrag on it recently? How long does your bootup into windows take? hit ctrl-alt-delete, how many processes are running?

The solution could be that your PC is crapped up with spyware, almost full, your swapfile is messed up, very defragmented - any one of a myriad of small software problems that are easily fixed.

First solution - get the latest version of windowscare (its free) from download.com and defrag the hdd and clean the registry and optimise and all that..

Or you could do a windows reinstall..

then

if all that isn't working, then you should look into upgrading your PC with perhaps new motherboard, quad processor and samsung F3 harddrive

Not a lot of space to be honest... I've 500gig in the PC and 2 ext 1x 750 and 1x 1TB all nearly full lol...

I've not defragged in a long long long time.. I'm nearly sure i've never done it on this HDD. I'll do it tho.. I'm not at home so I cant check the processes.. but i'm sure there's loads.... I've ran spyware few times also hijack this... But i'll try again.



--

As for Over clocking.. I've never tried it and wouldnt as i've no idea how to and wouldnt want to feck anything up.

PogMoThoin

Best thing You can do is have Your games completely in a seperate partion on a different drive to Your Windows and defrag after the install and patch of every game. I have a seperate 250GB games partion on one of my storage drives. This way You can reinstall Windows and all Your games will still work, just right click the .exe and send the shortcut to the desktop and Your back playing.

BadCharlie

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Best thing You can do is have Your games completely in a seperate partion on a different drive to Your Windows and defrag after the install and patch of every game. I have a seperate 250GB games partion on one of my storage drives. This way You can reinstall Windows and all Your games will still work, just right click the .exe and send the shortcut to the desktop and Your back playing.

This is what i have also done it works a treat.

Solitaire

Wait... you don't have the offending apps installed on an external drive by any chance?! :eek: That could be the explanation right there!

Along with the lack of defrag

NeVeR

Solitaire wrote: »

Wait... you don't have the offending apps installed on an external drive by any chance?! :eek: That could be the explanation right there!

Along with the lack of defrag

No it's on the normal drive,,, I wouldnt really know how to set up a seperate partion


i'll try a defrag