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My Computer Specs
eagles12555
Member Posts: 219
in Hardware
So basically I want my computer to be able to run games faster and not freeze up during game play.
I've been told to upgrade my video card, but I'm not really sure. What do you suggest I upgrade and with what should I upgrade it with?
Processor: Intel core 2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13 GHz
RAM: 2G
Video Card: GeForce 8800 GT
Which would make the biggest difference in gaming performance?
Comments
Depends what you want to play? Games like rift on ultra settings, I would suggest CPU and RAM. If you dont care about ultra settings then just RAM. But if you want the rig to stay up with how fast technology is changing and games are changing, all of the above.
Biggest factor when considering a video card upgrade is the size of your power supply, and your budget. Budget in general is a must for any upgrade option really. High end GPUs use a lot of power - more than twice as much as your CPU alone. And of course, when it comes to price, the sky is the limit when it comes to what you can spend on graphics cards, but often upgrades can be found for not too much. Your total budget can determine what bits and pieces may fit best for your upgrade plan.
Come back with an answer for those two questions, and we can line you up with good choices. "As cheap as possible" isn't a good budget choice, a hard ceiling number (no matter what that may be) is what we need.
My limit is roughly 150 dollars. What would my money be best spent on? When I played Red Faction Guerrilla, my computer would get extremely choppy when I blew up a building. I mean borderline unplayable. What can I do to get games running smoothly.
And as for RIFT, i can play that game on low/medium graphics smoothly, but when I bump up to high or ultra, my framerate just drops. and it gets reallychoppy.
My concern is what kind of game does he/she want to play and what settings. If he updates the graphics card, his CPU might be a bottleneck. I learned that the hard way, but it gave me an excuse to rebuild.
For instance I had a AMD 5200 2.5ghrz duel core. 3 gigs of RAM and upgraded from an 8800 GTS with 648mb card to the NVIDIA GTX 460 with 1024mb and had no performance boost running Rift. I had to run it on medium settings and barely got 18fps
So now I built a new rig with a AMD Phenom II quad 3.4 ghrz, 4 gigs ram and using the Nvidia GTX 460 and can now get 55 fps. So a big performance boost because I went with a higher CPU. Plus I added one more gig of ram then what I had in my last build.
But again, it all depends what games the OP likes to play and what settings the OP wants to run at, plus how much he/she can afford.
So any ideas?
Bumping up to 4G certainly won't hurt, and will be fairly inexpensive (~$40). 2G is a tight squeeze, especially if you are running Vista or Win7. That leaves us with a little over $100 to throw at the video card. The bump from 4G to 2G isn't huge, but if your system has to start hitting the swap file (your hard drive grinds all the time), it will become immediately noticeable, and will really help with game stuttering and load times.
The CPU is passable, it's a bit on the low end for new release games, but upgrading it will be a significant expense, as to get much more performance your going to need a newer motherboard to go with it (it's an LGA755 socket - you can find faster CPUs to fit that socket, but they are not price competitive with other solutions - not much bang for the buck). Your CPU still has enough juice left in it that a video card upgrade will still yield some noticeable results. And if you feel comfortable overclocking and have a motherboard that will allow it, you can probably tease a bit more performance out of that chip ( http://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/503808-idiots-guide-to-overclock-e6400/ )
Video there are a couple of options. An ATI 5770 is a significant boost over your 8800GT, for around $120 new. An nVidia GTS450 is just slightly slower for the about same price. Both of these cards are DX11 compatible, and more importantly draw about the same power as your existing 8800GT so your power supply won't be an issue (~105W). If you are confident that your not running out of memory (swap file - as indicated by the hard drive grinding all the time), and feel comfortable throwing your entire budget at video, you could go up to the GTX460 which is a good bit faster than both the 5770 and 450, and sometimes you can find sales/rebates that bring the 1G version down to around the $150 range.
I would recommend the RAM, especially if you are running Vista/Win7. Once you get that done and installed, then re-evaluate, you may find that it alone is enough to reduce your stuttering with your 8800, depending on what resolution you are running. Then if you still need more umph, look at your budget again and go for video next. If you need to go past that, honestly, I'd recommend starting to save for an entire new build or looking for cheap used parts on craigslist/ebay.
You're not going to get a video card that is much of an upgrade over that for $100. I'd sooner upgrade the processor with a Wolfdale Pentium dual core clocked around 3 GHz.
If you've got a decent but not great video card, you can make most games run smoothly by turning down video settings. If you're processor bound, then the game just isn't going to run smoothly and you're stuck.
Now, being able to turn down video settings assumes a decent video card, which the original poster has. Someone with integrated graphics, or a low end discrete card that is basically an integrated graphics GPU on a discrete board, needs to get a real video card. But the original poster isn't in that boat.
Unfortunately any one thing you upgrade will be held back by the other 2 components you don't upgrade.
You have identified two areas already that you have run into a wall: the debris flying around in Red Faction causing slowdown is a CPU issue, while RIFT being playable at low/medium settings but not high is a GPU issue. And 2GB of RAM is barely enough especially trying to play an MMO which are usually memory intensive.
So the choice on which to upgrade is really tricky.
With your limited budget you may want to consider buying used, *not* from ebay though. If you check the For Sale/Trade forums on anandtech.com, hardforum.com or overclock.net you can find some good deals from people passing on their components after an upgrade rather than the questionable junk on ebay.
If you do you should be able to pick up a GTX 460 768MB for about $100, 2x 1GB DDR2 RAM for $20, and if you have any cash left over consider buying a decent aftermarket heatsink w/thermal paste so you can overclock your CPU as much as possible.
This isn't the "best" way to upgrade, especially since as Quizzical said you can always turn down your graphics to match your 8800GT and those $100-$120 video cards aren't a *huge* leap over your 8800GT. But it's the only way to address all 3 of your issues at once for $150..
Okay thanks for all the help guys
I guess I'm gonna go for the 4 gigs of ram first. Right now i have Two 1 gig sticks of ram.
Anyone have any suggestions for the ram? like a link or something ?
$35 for 2x1GB DDR2-800:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820211066
I could probably find 2GB's of DDR2 sitting around here to sell if you are interested in used parts, kinda sucks to buy DDR2 new since it's a dead end upgrade (not usable in your next motherboard).
Also I realized you can get a GTX 460 768MB for about $100 used or $150 - $30 mail in rebate = $120 which would probably be the way to go if you decide to upgrade the video card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127512
Interesting that DDR3 memory is so much cheaper than DDR2 now. If you've got a motherboard that takes DDR2, then that's what you need, of course.
But why are they still making DDR2 versions of video cards that should use DDR3 or better? New Egg has 12 Evergreen cards with DDR2 memory, for example. Six of those are Redwood, so DDR2 really hamstrings the card. For that matter, DDR3 holds the card back, too, but at least that can be justified as cheaper and lower power than GDDR5.
Okay thanks!
First question is, since i already have two 1 gig sticks or RAM installed, wouldn't I need to replace them with two 2 gig sticks? or can i just add two more 1 gig sticks? Sorry for the simple questions, I'm really not a good computer hardware guy :
Second, that video card looks pretty solid for the price, do you think the combination of the new 4 gigs or RAM and the new video card would boost my computers performance?
If your using a high res monitor (like 1920x1080 or some such), look at getting a 1gig vid card. That will help push out the higher resolutions.
If you are using 1280x1024, then you'll be fine with the 768mb card.
I am using a 1920x1200 monitor, so either use a smaller one or go for the 1gig video card?
I have a similar resolution and I upgraded to a 6850 1gig instead of a 768mb card. I couldn't imagine pushing that kind of resolution with less. If you have the $$, I would def do that. Besides... more is better is it not?! :P
Freezing up is usually due to bad memory, at least if it bluescreens. If it just lag the reasons are different, probably that you have a rather ancient computer.
First you should check out if you have a burrnt out memory or not: here is a free link to a easy program.
Just make a bootable CD and run it, let it check for a few hours and see if you get any error. If you do it can be on the ram, on the GFX card or in rare cases on the processor cash.
Ok then, assuming you had no errors (If you have send me a PM and I help you out), here is a list with recommended upgrades in order from best performance for the money:
1. New GFX card. 8800 is really old now and while it was a great card 5+ years ago time have moved. Since you have an Nvidia I will recommend you a new one: 560 GTX. It will increase your performance a lot. A 460 is fine as well.
2. More ram. 2 extra GBs will also help you a lot for a small sum.
3. Upgrade of CPU and if possible motherboard. The 6400 is ancient. the 6700 is the best improvement you can get without changing motherboard. A sandy bridge is of course recommended but if you can get a 6700 really cheap it is still a rather good upgrade. Or you could try to clock it up if you have good cooling.
A free thing is that you should clean up your computer to get most of it. Start with getting Add aware and get rid off possible spyware that slows you down. Then download easycleaner and clean out all junk and all useless stuff that starts when you boot up. Always keep 10% of your main HD empty.
It depends on how many slots your MB have, if you have 2 empty adding 2 more with the same specs as the ones you already have is the best choice.
What OS are you running? If you are running a 32bit vista or WIndows 7, you will not be able to run over 3gigs. You may wan to check that out before you go purchase more ram.
Hard drive plays a huge factor in most games, everyone thinks it's everything else, which it is, but not as much as hard drive. If you have an old IDE hard drive try upgrading to something like a SATA drive. If your motherboard doesn't even support SATA, upgrade both.
PLAY WURM ONLINE!! www.wurmonline.com
Well, it is 4 gigs but that is both ram and GFX memory. If he have to much it will slow things down a little and he will only have 4 together but it will still be faster than with just 2, Tried it myself for a week before iI changed to 64 bits, it was still faster than with 2 gigs.
Upgrading to a 64 bits system is recommended but it do use more memory than XP.
64 bit is only useful after 4gb of ram or more. Also, 64bit has a lot of problems with games, not reccomended.
PLAY WURM ONLINE!! www.wurmonline.com
Tough call.
If you have decent frame rates that die suddently, watch your hard drive light and see if it's flashing alot during these low FPS times. If so,, I'd recommend more memory. I'd say go to 4 gigs, but your core is 32 bit and therefore your OS is, too. That limits you to 3.3 gigs. I guess if you could find another gig for cheap, I'd do it, first.
If the drive light isn't flashing all the time, chances are you're coming up on some smoke or fog effect that your vid card can't handle, so you may want to upgrade the vid card. But you may have limitations, here if think your machine has AGP instead of PCI express. It's probably PCI-X. But as others have already said, don't expect that if you go out and pick up the latest and greatest card out there that it will run like it.
I'm not sure what options are even available for CPU, but I doubt there are many. It mostly depends on your motherboard chipset.
I have definitely not encountered this. Which makes sense, since 64bit OS's only run 32bit apps in... 32 bit.
Now, I've had problems running 64 bit processors with 4 gig of memory and a 32 bit OS(I was using an old copy of XP til' W7 came out)...
If you're running the game at that resolution, you're lucky you're getting ANY decent frame rate at all!
If you're using a 1920x1200 monitor, then I assume that's a CRT monitor and not LCD?
If so, at least you can reduce the resolution without it looking like monkey butt. LCD's run outside of their native resolution look horrible.
So what I got from this is that if I switch to my older monitor, (its still really nice, but it works with 1280x1024) My framerates will be better.
Right now im running from a 1920x1200, so I could switch, it wouldnt be the end of the world.
Also, I'm running on 32 bit windows 7. Seeing as I can only use 3.3gigs of RAM, I'll most likely get one more 1 gig stick then. i guess ill upgrade my video card along with that.
Budget is now roughly 240~
My monitor is a Dell 2407 WFP model if that helps
I don't get blue screens, I've never gotten one.
Would it be helpful if i posted my DxDiag.txt ?