Questioning Upgrades

[TehFunk]

I just built my new computer a week ago and im already thinking about my next upgrade in the next 2 to 3 months. My choices have boiled down to either another gig of Ballistix ram bringing the total up to 2 gig, or getting a new video card such as an evga 7900gt co or ko because right now all i have is a $100 7600gs. Whenever i play battlefield my G15 system monitor usually says im only using 80% of my ram and 95-100% of the cpu. I know thats probably not exactly right, but why would i get another gig when im not even using the total amount of what i have now. I get rather crappy 3dmark05 scores, so i think that the bottleneck for my sytem is the gpu. Plus, using Evga's step-up program, i can turn in my current card and get a 7900gt for around $190. Or i could buy another 7600gs and do rather well as ive heard.
My system specs are as follow----
Asus A8n SLi Deluxe
AMD Athlon 64 3500 @ 2.2ghz
Evga 7600gs 256mb stock speeds w/stock fan
1gig Crucial ballistix ram @ ddr400
Audigy 2
Aspire x-navigator case w/500w psu

BTW if it matters i run all settings maxed except AA and res(1024x768)

[TheHairyYeti]

Re: Questioning Upgrades

hmmm, hard decesion. probably go for the new graphics if the game is running smooth enough with that ram, if it is choppy then go for more ram, should be fine. imo get a better gpu

[sackynut]

Re: Questioning Upgrades

okay, here would be my asnwer: if you ONLY play bf2, defintly get the extra gig of ram and try to play on high.

if you play other games : source;fear; all those new games, go with the 7900gt.

[old sch00l]

Re: Questioning Upgrades

With your system you will notice the biggest difference by getting another 1g: 1.5g+ is optimal for bf2.

The CPU will always bottle the GPU atm, so unless you plan on a major upgrade, upgrade your gfx card after ram

[sackynut]

Re: Questioning Upgrades

the CPU actaully wont bottleneck it, at least not in bf2...

[Blak_Phoenix]

Re: Questioning Upgrades

In BF2 the video cards are the bottleneck, CPUs run it fine. And not even 2x 7900GTS's can "bring down" the FX-60. That is just super dooper fast! lol, but yea, i would say video card, butone way to tell is this...

If your game plays fine for a while then when in heavy fights or you are driving fast in a jeep and after driving for 20secs or so your game starts to lag, then you need more RAM. This happens as your CPU runs out of RAM to use, so it goes to the HDD, to give you an idea of how much this slws the pc down loko at these figues... RAM can access data at about 6ns (nanoseconds) HDD's do it in about 4ms or so (or roughly those figures). So it is nearly 10 times slower. This causes these lags.

But if however it is simply always laggy/glitchy, or you just cant play all high settings, it is your video card.

Hope that helped.. lol. :)