ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

[TrooperJac]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

P2P is file sharing. Like emule or bittorrent.

Okay it may be that your CPU is what is slowing you down. If so you should find that you can up your graphics with little extra performance hit. I don't know much about the Pentium D and how is relates speed wise to a core duo etc. Have you tried overclocking your CPU. I have overclocked mine from 1.87ghz to 3.0ghz although I find it makes little difference to 2142.

Without sitting at your machine personally its hard to identify what issue your having so don't bite my head off if I suggest things that seem obvious.

You have plugged in the extra molex connection for power to your graphics card right

Have you applied these updates to windows XP :

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896256

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/909944

[imported_Field]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

i did notice that i could play on very high settings and my framerate wasnt too much worse than when i had it on low settings which i thought was kind of wierd

i've looked at overclocking abd how to do it. In the boot menu it says at the bottom. "these fields are not changeable" so apparently they made my Dell comp unable to overclock.

yes, i did plug in the molex connector

i just installed the first one but with the second one i have a 805 chipset and in the downloads they didnt seem to have an update for the Pentium(r) 805

[TrooperJac]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

Did that update make any difference?

Is your Dell supplied with the operating system installed and when was the last time you wiped your system and did a clean install.

[imported_Field]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

ill get back to you on whether it made a diffference

the computer came with the operating system, i didnt have to install it

i did a clean install 1.5 months ago. im not totally sure but the computer seemed a bit faster.

67% of my 80GB hard drive is free space

[imported_Field]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

update: no i dont think there is any diffference with this new windows update

[Killerus]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

i mentioned this in another post. You need to find out how many amps your power supply is outputing on the 12 volt rail that is connected to your video card. The 8800 GT requires 26 amps to run properly. You could get away with 22-24 amps, but anything less is asking for poor performance or possible card damage. Dell should have this information for you , if you can't find it on your powersupply.

[imported_Field]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

yeah thanks

[AvalancheDiode]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

you didnt read that it ran CoD4 on max setting real smooth but hardly did anything in terms of improving the framerate for this game.

I do suggest you to replace your current PSU to 450 or even 500W one. If you don't, you will probably destroy your current PSU anyway. Most of the problems with PSU is that the fan will wear out faster by dust accumulation and starts to make funny noise. The thing is that over 60Hz refreshing rate is almost meaningless unless your monitor is also set to higher refreshing rate. I still use 4:3 and D-Sub, so I don't really care about >60Hz. People using wide screens and send signal through DVI-D should set their monitors to 4:3 resolution. Otherwise, the graphics driver is just doing another layer of shader to stretch it wider, which, in my own opinion, doesn't make much sense with BF2/2142, and could be the problem why you can't get higher frame rate.

[imported_Field]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

hmm thats something i havent heard caus yeah my mom bought a widescreen monitor for her comp but her onboard gpu was too bad to set the screen properly so i got the widescreen monitor and then in order to center the screen properly i set the refresh to 72hz i dont know how much of a difference that makes but you have a point.

oh and i looked and i actually have a 470w that i got from PC power and cooling. i got a dell so i bought on of those special dell psus

[TrooperJac]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

Stretching the display to accomodate widescreen makes no noticeable difference to my frame rate. I even use the widescreen fixer so theoretically my display is having to render more geometry.

I think your barking up the wrong tree with the power supply. If you have a decent 475watt supply buying another one will not improve you gaming performance.

Following this thread I think the thing that is harming your 2142 experience is your CPU. You say that playing 64 player and Titan games is what hits your performance. You also say that COD4 and other games run much better. These newer games are optimised for multithreading which means they can utilise both of the cores of your CPU. 2142 can't do that.

I guess the only thing you could do to improve performance without buying another CPU would be to optimise windows XP. There are guides on the net that explain how to disable background services and programs that may help you get a few more frames from your games.

http://www.tweakxp.com/article37047.aspx

[imported_Field]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

thanks Jac. I really appreciate your help. i've learned more about my comp as a result

[AvalancheDiode]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

thanks Jac. I really appreciate your help. i've learned more about my comp as a result

Are you sure you have PCI-Express x16 2.0 on your mainboard?

[imported_Field]

Re: ok so i bought an 8800GT and..

mine isnt 2.0 its just the regular x16 i just read somewhere that it would still work with x16.

2.0 has more bandwidth or something but sucks more juice.