quick upgrade

Hotman

Hi there,
I currently have a fairy crap system, its a Core 2 Duo E6600 at 2500Mhz, 2gb of 6400 DDR 2 i think, something very similar to that anyway, and a ATI HD 3870 with 512mb DDR4 ram (its a powercolor one)

I just want to know, im playing batman on my asus P221 22" screen and it looks awesome at the standard 1680x1050 and it looks lovely, but when im playing something like Crysis, i can only have it on medium settings and theres some slowdown. i also can barely play Starcraft2 but its very slow even with low graphics settings,

Do you think i need to upgrade my whole system to be able to prolong the life of the stuff i have or would sinply upgrading my GFX card to a new geforce or a 5 series ATI (i seem to prefer Nvidia). If this is the case can you recommend a card that whoops my 3870 for up to a max of 150.

Thanks!

Monotype

I think you could get by another little while with the processor, although you would probably need an upgrade next year. 2GB of RAM is looking low these days too.

Just above the €150 mark are the 1GB GTX 460 and the 6850.
Just below (so you should be able to get it delivered for €150 is the GTX 460 768MB. Avoid any "SE" versions.

Hotman

ok so now im using a GTX460 768MB (Asus TOP), an E6600, DDR 6200 ram.. and res evil is still running at 29fps, wow is stuttering all over the shop on low settings, BF2 BC is like 15fps at 1680x1050 and stuttering, also even batman etc when im turning it freezes for a second ... whats up!

Jonny7

What is the brand and power of the PSU in your system? your system might be sucking too much juice from a weak PSU

Have you done a proper big cleanup recently? (use windows care free on download.com give everything a good clean and defrag)

Your machine should run all those games fine with no problems.. even the 3870 should have had no problem with sc2.

Get those out of the way first..

Then you can start going thru things one by one like if the hdd is failing

Mr Benevolent

Jonny7 wrote: »

What is the brand and power of the PSU in your system? your system might be sucking too much juice from a weak PSU

Have you done a proper big cleanup recently? (use windows care free on download.com give everything a good clean and defrag)

Your machine should run all those games fine with no problems.. even the 3870 should have had no problem with sc2.

Get those out of the way first..

Then you can start going thru things one by one like if the hdd is failing

What he said. Reinstall Windows if needs be. If you don't you'll be to defrag your drive and generally clean out the crap.

challengemaster

I'd take a guess that it might just be CPU-limited? Atleast in some games, especially bad company as it utilizes quad-core...

Jonny7

challengemaster wrote: »

I'd take a guess that it might just be CPU-limited? Atleast in some games, especially bad company as it utilizes quad-core...

WoW and SC2 should run fine
I even have bfbc2 perfectly smooth on a slower core2duo than the OP

There is definitely some issue

Hotman

should i re-install windows? is it possible my PSU is ****? i had to plug 2 power thingies into it.. although i only have a HDD, and GFX card plugged into.. please help, i just installed the latest nvidia drivers

Jonny7

Open up the PC

there's a sticker on the side of the PSU, the make and model should be enough for us to figure it out

Before you do a reinstall.. logically clean up and clear up your PC with a good disk defrag, registry defrag, spyware clean etc etc you'd be surprised how many PC's return to full health after that

Hotman

cool thanks, should my PC be working ok then? im just getting like 45 fps in wow at 1680-1050 with low settings, and when im turning around sometimes it kinda freezes for a split second quite alot...

could it be a HDD issue and a PSU issue?

Should i upgrade to this?
Intel Core i5 760 ...1 Asus P7P55D-E Inte...1 Corsair XMS3 4GB (...
its about 290 sterling minus delivery

Jonny7

well if your PSU is the problem here, then upgrading your processor/board/ram won't really make a diff you'll prob have the same problem

A weak PSU can be the issue, just check the brand and how much power it has, i mean if its a corsair 550 watt it should hardly be the problem, but if its some noname 250 watt then it could be

Honestly, your processor is a little aged, but it can still handle modern games and with that graphics card it should have no probs with WoW and SC2 at that res.. even bc2

Anyway, don't panic, take your time, download windows care free from download.com, clean up your pc, make sure u have enough hdd space and phsyically open up the pc to check what kind of psu u have and when computer is running listen to check if any of the fans are running extremely loud or anything

Hotman

cheers johnny,

i know the PSU aint some **** one, it's an ok brand and i know its like 500w or so, no less anyway, nothing is loud, it runs really quiet, i actually disabled the fan on the side as it was extra 60mm one, the cpu runs at like 28c and i can see it goes full load in any game.

the worrying this is not the low framerate, but the movement issue, like the momentary freezing etc when im running/moving happening constantly.

could it be a HDD issue? i notic no issues when im installing or copying anythign onto the HDD, but could that be whats causing the **** speeds? i unintalled loads of spare crap off the PC last night and it increaed my FPS in res evil benchemark by about 4fps.. so its average 32fps on both 1024x768 and 1680x1050..

i wouldn't mind if i was running everything on max and getting **** framerates, but have like MW2 on medium settings, no AA at 1680x1050 and its crawling and freezing slightly when moving - about 12fps.

WoW at medium to high settings, same res is the same, 16-35 fps.. but even at that i get that momentary freezing.

Hank Scorpio

I`d just put it down to a weak system, trying to run newish games in HD resolutions, no offence.

challengemaster

nuxxx wrote: »

I`d just put it down to a weak system, trying to run newish games in HD resolutions, no offence.

I'd stick with this.

The freezing/stuttering sounds like it's still loading up parts of the map, which would lead me towards the RAM also being a bottleneck. Tbh, nowadays, 2gb of ram is quite a small amount, IIRC MW2 uses 1.4 - 1.9 GB of RAM alone. That's why you're jerky all over the place. Get 4+ GB in there, and a 64 bit version of Windows.

If you upgrade the CPU to a quad core you'd see a major performance increase all across the board, once the RAM is sorted.

if your current motherboard isn't a pain for overclocking, i'd push the e6600 to 3+Ghz, I've mine at 3.2 without changing any other settings. If you see a boost in FPS then you know there's a bottleneck.


edit: Just running a few benchmarks myself to give you a comparison

Crysis (original - dont have warhead)

Run #1- DX9 1400x960 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: Medium ~~ Overall Average FPS: 60.755
Run #2- DX9 1400x960 AA=No AA, 32 bit test, Quality: High ~~ Overall Average FPS: 41.285
Run #3- DX9 1400x960 AA=8xQ, 32 bit test, Quality: Custom (medium + high shaders) ~~ Overall Average FPS: 29.585

Unigine Heaven Benchmark v2.1
FPS: 28.5
Scores: 719
Min FPS: 5.4
Max FPS: 56.3

Settings
Render: direct3d9
Mode: 1440x900 8xAA fullscreen
Shaders: high
Textures: high
Filter: trilinear
Anisotropy: 16x
Occlusion: enabled
Refraction: enabled
Volumetric: enabled
Replication: disabled
Tessellation: disabled

3DMark '06 (Ran twice)

11610 3DMarks

SM2.0 Score: 5349.0
HDR/SM3.0 Score: 5648.0
CPU Score: 2469.0
Game Score N/A
GT1 - Return To Proxycon: 43.28 FPS
GT2 - Firefly Forest: 45.87 FPS
CPU1 - Red Valley :0.78 FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley :1.25 FPS
HDR1 - Canyon Flight: 57.85 FPS
HDR2 - Deep Freeze: 55.12 FPS



11175 3DMarks

SM2.0 Score: 5124.0
HDR/SM3.0 Score: 5706.0
CPU Score: 2247.0
Game Score: N/A
GT1 - Return To Proxycon: 41.51 FPS
GT2 - Firefly Forest: 43.89 FPS
CPU1 - Red Valley: 0.7 FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley: 1.15 FPS
HDR1 - Canyon Flight: 58.58 FPS
HDR2 - Deep Freeze: 55.54 FPS



Rig:
e6600 @ 3.2GHz
8800gtx
asus maximus formula x38
4gb Geil ddr2 pc6400
windows XP 32 bit

Jonny7

"i also can barely play Starcraft2 but its very slow even with low graphics settings"

That system is more than capable at running sc2 at those settings, same with WoW.. those two games should have no stutter

Just check how many backround processes are running.. you could have a lot of stuff loaded from startup

Clean up the pc as much as possible, get rid of junk thats running, close your virus checker.. everything

Otherwise looks like an operating system reinstall might be the solution