I'm pretty comfortable with the stability of the setup I have now that I installed the Athlon 2600 last week. Temperatures have dropped under 100 deg. F finally, and things seem to be running alright. Now its time to push.
First I downloaded a program that gives me processor speed/voltage and bus speed, and also gives me the specs on my RAM and MOBO. I started making changes to my BIOS and quickly found the RAM I have is inferior and the slowest settings are the only ones it can use (one DIMM is not even readable with the program I downloaded). I've been meaning to upgrade from 512MB up to 1GB anyway, so this just gives me an excuse to do it sooner.
Ive been reading as much as I can find on ways to enhance performance, including overclocking the CPU and/or RAM. It seems everyone has a different opinion. Before I go any further I'd like to make sure I have it straight and dont have any misconceptions. Also, one of the few things anyone agreed on was that different programs respond differently to various "tweaks", and I'd like to make sure I'm addressing the right things to make AH run better.
1. I am seriously torn on which RAM to buy. For right at 170 bucks I can get a pair of 512 MB memory sticks with heat dissipators that are PC2700 (which I have now) but have the lower latency settings. Ive seen that the lower settings can give a 1% performance increase. My CPU is running on a 333 FSB so it would match. Ive seen plenty of people say to buy the faster RAM (the 400mhz bus PC3200) but several pointed out that if the CPU cant make it up to the 400mhz FSB also then the data rate wont increase from 2.7GB/sec (which is what the 333 RAM is rated at to start with). Makes sense, but if anyone can refute that I'd be interested in hearing the argument. To get the same quality RAM in the PC3200 I have to spend 50 bucks more.
2. I'm not looking for a huge increase on the part of the processor. I'd just like to get it over 2 Ghz. Its at 1.9 right now. I've never done this before and I dont want to screw anything up. I've got a Biostar nForce2 motherboard with the latest BIOS. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Memory seems to be an important upgrade for something like AH, since the AGP is using whatever I set aside via my AGP aperture setting for textures. Or am I reading too much into that? Several benchmark tests I looked at that tried different memory and different aperture settings showed direct correlations between speed of memory, size of aperture (up to 128MB) and better scores on the benchmark tests. Seems to me that could be an argument for using the PC3200 memory. I'm confused on whether or not the transfer of textures from system RAM to AGP is related to the data transfer rate between system RAM and CPU?
Again, any suggestions would be appreciated. Alot of this stuff is new territory for me.
