Performance mystery

[ChopperKill]

Re: Performance mystery

A venice 3000+ will go to 3800+ speeds with stock cooling. Asus A8N for a mobo and something like Corsair Value or Crucial RAM.

If you're overclocking however you may want to get faster ram that will take a bigger overclock or you will have to run your RAM asynchronously if you get cheaper value RAM. Saying that though it probably wouldn't give you much more performance if you did.

[imported_Wasp]

Re: Performance mystery

The P4 with 533FSB is a weak CPU for gaming. Single channel PC 2700 ram doesn't help much either. This is definetly what is holding you back. To get some idea how your system is performing go to www.futuremark.com and download 3DMark01SE. This is a good benchmark for testing CPU/memory as well as the 3D card. I'll give you some results to compare with. An AMD Athlon XP 2400+/PC 2700 2x256MB dual channel/ATI 9800PRO gets about 15500 points. An Intel P4 2.8Ghz 800FSB/2x512MB PC3200 dual channel/ATI 9700 gets about 16000. An AMD Athlon XP 3200+/2x512MB PC 3200 dual channel/ATI 9800PRO gets about 18000.

Switching motherboards to a dual channel 865 might improve performance a bit but it's hard to say exactly how much. If I where strapped for cash I might have tried that + overclocking a bit.

[Valorum]

Re: Performance mystery

Thanks for the feedback. I'll d/l the 3DMark stuff so i have a quantitative measure to compare. Just hadn't done it this far because it's such a big download :) Thanks for posting those comparative numbers, that'll help give me a feel for where my setup is performance-wise.

[Valorum]

Re: Performance mystery

Just as an interesting note... I did the "Ultra-high" settings as described in some other thread, and was able to run that without a whole lot of more penalty than running stuff at medium. Go figure. To me it certainly indicates that the video card is not the weak link. An interesting thing to note is that i seem to see few if any servers with pings below 120 in the browser. I'm sure that has something to do with some of it as well. I'll have to investigate.

[Razorman01]

Re: Performance mystery

Buy another gig of ram & YOU WILL see a marked increase in performance, it's a cheap upgrade & what have you got to lose??

BF2 demands 2gb of ram to run well, the improvements i saw after upgrading from 1gb to 2gb was astounding.

[imported_Wasp]

Re: Performance mystery

Thanks for the feedback. I'll d/l the 3DMark stuff so i have a quantitative measure to compare. Just hadn't done it this far because it's such a big download :) Thanks for posting those comparative numbers, that'll help give me a feel for where my setup is performance-wise.

Remember to get 3DMark01 not 03 or 05. 3DMark01 is only about 40MB.

[Valorum]

Re: Performance mystery

Ah, thanks for that, i would've gotten 05 if you hadn't said anything :)

[Valorum]

Re: Performance mystery

My current mobo only has 2 slots which are occupied by 2x512MB. So it's not -that- cheap an option unfortunately, since i'd have to get 2x1GB. Not sure what the going price is for ram that would suit my mainboard. I guess it's cheaper than upgrading my mobo plus cpu plus ram though. Then again, if i get 2GB for my current mobo and it doesn't help as much as i'd like, i probably can't use it on whichever new mobo i'd end up getting... decisions decisions :)

[imported_Wasp]

Re: Performance mystery

1GB ram is enough to run everything on medium. So I would start elsewhere when trying to improve performance. I run all medium except 2x antialiasing, texturefiltering on high and 100% view distance and have no harddrive activity while I play.

[BryanG]

Re: Performance mystery

If anyone is having FPS trouble and running Xfire at the same time, close xfire. I play with out it on high settings, 4x AA and my FPS is always above 50. My brother plays with the same settings, same computer, but with Xfire and sometimes teamspeak on and his FPS is constantly below 30.