Bottleneck/Upgrade options

Vic Vinegar

Here's what i have:

MSI 770-C45 - AM3 Socket - 770 Chipset

AMD Athlon II X3 440 -3 GHz -AM3 Socket

2x2gb OCZ XTC Platinum DDR3 1066 (7-7-7-16)

Ati 4670 1gb

1 x 1tb HDD Western Digital 7200rpm 16mb

550 watt PSU (corsair, i think)

The everest app is saying that my FSB properties on the mobo are 200mhz real clock speed and effective clock speed, is that normal? it seems quite low...

Just wondering what the bottleneck is on my system, and what would be a good way to improve it...

We don't really use it for gaming apart from The Sims 3 and stuff like that (yawn!) but it seems to struggle on high settings on that even. I'm no expert but i reckon it should be able to run that without issue. Am i right? (she has tonnes of custom content though so maybe that's something to do with it)

Cheers.

Tea_Bag

have you tried a new clean install of windows?

it should handle the Sims fine.

you could try unlock the shut down core on your CPU by going into your BIOS. if you get lucky you could get a quad core athlon, and if you're very lucky you could end up with a Phenom x4.

Vic Vinegar

Tea_Bag wrote: »

have you tried a new clean install of windows?

Only every 6 months!

Tea_Bag wrote: »

you could try unlock the shut down core on your CPU by going into your BIOS. if you get lucky you could get a quad core athlon, and if you're very lucky you could end up with a Phenom x4.

I might give that a try, i do worry about the cooling capabilites of the PC, i've only got stock heatsinks on the CPU and GPU (the graphics fan in particular is awful and makes quite a din)

Tea_Bag

monitor the temps with HW monitor. its free.
the gpu should be fine with it's stock cooler and if it isn't OCd, unless you have no intake fans or even vents on your case. being loud is the only thing stock coolers do well unfortunately. are all the video drivers up to date?

what resolution is your monitor?

Vic Vinegar

Tea_Bag wrote: »

monitor the temps with HW monitor. its free.
the gpu should be fine with it's stock cooler and if it isn't OCd, unless you have no intake fans or even vents on your case. being loud is the only thing stock coolers do well unfortunately. are all the video drivers up to date?

what resolution is your monitor?

My resolution is 1440 x 900 i think.

I did some overclocking there on my CPU, got it to 3215Mhz up from 2900Mhz. Still running pretty cool too. 31c at idle, pretty much the same as before.

Would there be any point adding more ram? i'm thinking it might be handy for when i'm using Ableton and the like

Tea_Bag

I'm not familiar with albeton but 4gb is enough for 95% of applications.

did you try unlock the core? a stable unlock would be far better than an overclock.

Vic Vinegar

Tea_Bag wrote: »

did you try unlock the core?

I did but it blue screened soon after booting.

M00lers

They usually need a small voltage increase after unlocking, did you try that?

Vic Vinegar

moolers2000 wrote: »

They usually need a small voltage increase after unlocking, did you try that?

No i didn't, is that easily enough done?

M00lers

Yeah easy enough. Just find the CPU voltage in the BIOS and up the voltage a bit.

Tea_Bag

I think its called Vcore on the 770-C45.

tbh, Im not sure its going to work. the auto voltage should have stopped it from BSODing unless you were running heavy stability tests at the time of the BSOD

still though, try it out.

Vic Vinegar

Tea_Bag wrote: »

I think its called Vcore on the 770-C45.

tbh, Im not sure its going to work. the auto voltage should have stopped it from BSODing unless you were running heavy stability tests at the time of the BSOD

still though, try it out.

Nah, it isn't gonna work, never mind anyway. I'm still getting a bit of extra juice out of the CPUs with the OCing. I might just plump for a better CPU later on maybe.

Tea_Bag

Bombleswizzum wrote: »

Nah, it isn't gonna work, never mind anyway. I'm still getting a bit of extra juice out of the CPUs with the OCing. I might just plump for a better CPU later on maybe.

thats a pitty. mine unlocked to a phenom x4 (difference between the athlon and phenom is basically the phenom has a 6mb L3 cache and the athlon has none) but it consumes quite a bit of juice when unlocked and doesnt like to OC (ive gotten it to 3.7ghz @ 3 cores and only stable to 3.2ghz @ 4 cores. its stock @ 2.9ghz)

anyway, you're able to pick up a phenom x4 955 for under €100 delivered occasionally and thats almost as good as it gets for you, but is still able to game along nicely.