Author Topic: Upgrade help (Read 590 times)

Nomak · « **on:** December 19, 2006, 06:21:41 PM »

OK.....

My wifes machine is not performing as well as I would like. Her machine is pieced together from about 3 different machines over about 4 years. I really thought it would be enough for her but its not.

She plays the "Sim's" and she has about a 6 pak of different expansions for it. She has a taste for playing the game at higher settings and its turning into a slide show. Here is what she is running......

-CoolerMaster midtower
-A generic 350 watt PS from a different case.
-Asus A8V AGP MB.
-AMD SanDiego core 64 3700+ running 10% overclock.
-PNY 6800 GT AGP
-1 Gig pc 2700
-Western 80 gig 8 meg cash drive 7200 rpm
-SoundBlaster live.

I am assuming that upgrading this set up is a waste of time, simply because its AGP.

My first thought was to buy her all new stuff. Something along the lines of......

-Conroe E6300
-MotherBoard?? SLI?? I have always used ASUS boards..... I am open to suggestions though. I dont really understand the whole N-bridge and S-bridge set ups. I need help here.
-1 BFG 7600GT ($65.00 rebate on this card right now)
-I gig DDR 667
-Seagate 320 gig SATA 3.0 7200rpm

Is this enough "Upgrade" for her? Do I need more? Or maybe I should pass off some of my componets to her and then upgrade mine?

My Rig....

-Thermaltake Armor SuperTower
-Asus P5N32 SE SLI Deluxe
- 1 EVGA 7900GT KO OC'ed
-550 Watt Antec PS
-WD Raptor 150 gig 10K rpm drive
-Pentium D805 DualCore OC'ed to 4.0 gig w/zalman cooler
-2x1 gig DDR 800 240 pin
-Onboard sound.

Maybe set her up with my 805 and my 7900 then upgrade mine? I dunno. Any and all suggestions are welcome. I have to admit that mine has had some issues recently and she is a bit weary of my parts going into her machine. Although mine is running well as I type this (Shrug)

help pls

Dave

Malachi · « **Reply #1 on:** December 20, 2006, 12:22:05 AM »

Dave,

I've been researching for a while and am going to build a "budget" but decent rig that's along the lines of what you're thinking for your wife. Newegg stuff is $1175 delivered at the moment (with misc. cables, etc), then wait for the $130 in rebates. You can reuse or shave some corners but I think this is a solid system:

Coolmaster Centurion case
OCZ Gamestream 700W PSU
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 mobo (great o'clocker)
e6400 Conroe
Corsair 2x1GB ddr2 800 (Model #: TWIN2X2048-6400C4)
Samsung DVD burner w/ lightscribe
WD SATA 3.0 250GB HD
same BFG 7600GT you're looking at, or 7900GS
Scythe Ninja revB heat sink (Model #: SCNJ-1100P)
40x40x10mm fan for Northbridge cooling (screw it into heat sink)

The Ninja takes a slight mod w/ Dremel or file to shave off part of bracket to clear some capacitors but is supposed to work great on this board. Small fan is cheap and works great for northbridge cooling w/out getting in way of your vid card. This rig supposedly easily o'clocks to 3.2GHz. I'll get a better vid card down the road. This would also be good system with lesser PSU and 1GB RAM. I can dig up some nerdy links to read if you're interested

eagl · « **Reply #2 on:** December 20, 2006, 05:23:48 AM »

To be honest I'm suprised that computer isn't "enough". To get much of a noticeable speedup, you'll need to get real high-end stuff. A 7900 or higher video card at least, latest dual core cpu from Intel, 2 gig fast ddr2 memory, big hard drive, etc.

What your wife has is pretty darn close to a mainstream "reasonable" gaming system from 6 months ago. You're gonna spend a couple thousand bucks because everything is going to have to go, and she's not going to be satisfied with anything but the best, because her rig is already fairly fast.

The system you quoted won't be much of an upgrade for her. She might not even notice the difference, or will consider the speedup to not be worth the expense. You're gonna have to do better than that. The sims is a very demanding game at the higher graphics settings... Might as well get an 8800 vid card while you're at it. A 7600GT won't be much of an upgrade from a 6800GT.

humble · « **Reply #3 on:** December 21, 2006, 06:51:09 PM »

the noticable problem is the 1 gig of PC2700...the board supports PC3200. I'd upgrade to 2 gigs of DDR400 and see what happens....

Reschke · « **Reply #4 on:** December 22, 2006, 08:18:37 AM »

What humble said.

Dump some money into the RAM unless you really want to spend $2k on a new system just for her to play the Sims. My wife also plays that but she does that on my old system which is built around an Athlon 64 with 1GB DDR400 ram on a Gigabyte K8N Pro with a BFG 6800 OC and an 80GB Maxtor HDD. The only thing I have done to this system in the last two years is update the video card from a GeForce4 Ti4600 to the 6800OC model and I did that right after the 6xxx series came out from nVidia.

Schutt · « **Reply #5 on:** December 22, 2006, 08:55:55 AM »

Would try to grab some ddr ram of a friend who no longer uses it and give the machine 2gb of ram. I guess lots of people have unused DDR ram lying around after xmas.

Sounds like a pretty nice system, if its a slide show (and not the ram) then you need something like 100% more power to have it work better. Consider a real slide show goes with 10 slides per second, now if you get a 20% improovement thats still 12 slides....

Also 6800GT is pretty good, you need at least a 7900 to make it better in nvidia terms, if that eaven is the problem.

I more like think that the PC is loaded with other tasks or there is a performance problem, so you can fix that on the software side with no costs. Just make sure not to mess all up... make a backup of all data on the pc first.

Also might help to defrag the hard drive and see if its still working without trouble and fast enough (sisoft sandra hd bench etc).

Another point is you might want to check how many background processes, worms, spyware, adware is on the pc. It might be infected and using 80 percent of its time with malicious tassks.

Or kill the 50 processes running. If the pc has to run email, yahoo, skype, irc, webbrowser, dvd rip and mp3 together with sims it might get slow. Especially video stuff, or downloading mpgs or running file sharing tools in the background.

ciao schutt

Tigger29 · « **Reply #6 on:** December 23, 2006, 08:51:14 PM »

That's the thing... not to seem sexist, but women tend to install every "Free" software they see advertised on popups... software such as incredimail may have some neat features, but really only eat away at your system and run adware in the background, which invites more nastiness and can really bring your system to a halt.

Go through the add/remove programs list and remove everything that she never uses or sounds... fishy. Then go to all the IM programs and make sure "automatically start when computer starts up" and "automatically start when connected to the internet" is both unchecked.

Also google all the current running processes and address all the fishy entries... also run good anti-virus (I recommend AVAST antivirus) and ad/spyware scans. Then do the obvious - removing temporary files... defrag... etc..

I used to have an AMD XP2200 (1.7GHZ) system... 768MB DDR ram... NVIDIA GEFORCE 6200 AGP video.. and onboard sound... and let me tell you it was a screamer (I've since fried the motherboard and waiting for funds to come in to replace it.. I'm currently on my backup, a 450MHZ system, 386MB SDRAM, 32MB ATI AGP - which runs SIMS1 with all the expansions perfectly well). Also got a consistent 45-50 FPS on AHII.

SIMS2 ran VERY well on my "old" system.. but this one is just too slow for it. It looks like what you have is better than what I had before so there is really not much excuse for it to be "slow", besides software or possible hardware nastiness.

Good luck.

Nomak · « **Reply #7 on:** December 24, 2006, 10:05:23 PM »

She is running 23 processes. I figured that was pretty good.

I thank all of you for your advice. I orderd 2 gig of corsair pc3200 for her. And I also orderd a Conroe E6600 for my rig. I am interested to see how it compares to my D805.

Thx again.... Dave

Edit......

Schutt, I always keep her machine defraged and what not. Messenger, auto updates and the like are turned off. I run adaware regularly. So I think its not really a tuning issue per-say.

If the upgraded ram doesnt do it than maybe a Hard drive update is next.

I will post results.

Dave

Nomak · « **Reply #8 on:** December 24, 2006, 10:13:04 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Tigger29

I'm currently on my backup, a 450MHZ system, 386MB SDRAM, 32MB ATI AGP - which runs SIMS1 with all the expansions perfectly well). Also got a consistent 45-50 FPS on AHII.

Thx for the reply and the help...... however I find this claim very hard to swollow.

Dave

JTs · « **Reply #9 on:** December 25, 2006, 04:53:04 PM »

350 psu may not be enough runing overclocked a 7200 rpm hd and video card all drawing power

Krusty · « **Reply #10 on:** December 25, 2006, 11:37:24 PM »

Quote

Originally posted by Nomak
Thx for the reply and the help...... however I find this claim very hard to swollow.

Dave

I think he meant he got that many FPS on the system that is busted. Now he's on the backup, which can barely run AH at all (trust me, I know, I've got an almost identical system, it really can't run AH) -- and he says the backup can't run Sims. I think it was just an unclear ordering of the sentences in that paragraph

MrRiplEy[H] · « **Reply #11 on:** December 26, 2006, 01:48:48 PM »

The rated ram speed doesn't mean diddly as long as it at least matches the CPU memory speed requirement. So if the memory subsystem runs at PC2700 speed you won't get any benefit from buying PC5000 ram. Double or triple amount of the same PC2700 however will show benefits.

If your wifes problem appears when higher resolutions are applied to the game, then the problem is 90% displaycard related and can be solved by upgrading a display card with sufficient amount of ram on it. Together with main ram upgrade it should do the trick.

The bad news is that youre still AGP so it's pretty much a no win situation.

Krusty · « **Reply #12 on:** December 26, 2006, 03:39:53 PM »

As an addition to what MrRipley said, if you have an older motherboard, it might not even SUPPORT the higher speeds. It just won't recognize the ram, or the ram is so fast it won't down-clock enough for the mobo to register. I've run into a couple of problems similar to this. Not often, though.

Nomak · « **Reply #13 on:** December 26, 2006, 04:17:40 PM »

I am not sure I understand the whole ram thing.

Her board says DDR400/PC3200. Right now she has DDR333/PC2700. The ram I orderd her is DDR400/PC3200. So because her board will run that speed it should be faster...... correct? Not to mention that I am going form 2x512 to 2x1gig. Should'nt I be able to overclock the DDR400 if I chose to once its up and running?

The more I thought about it the more I realized that she still has alot of room for upgrade even though she is still on AGP. X1650pro ATI cards are available still as well as 7600 Nvidia cards. So if video really is the problem I still have an option or 2. I definatly have room to upgrade the hard drive. Here board will do SATA. Also... its a 939 socket processor. So I can go do a dual core there or even to a FX series processor.

Makes sense?? No??

I figured.... try the ram upgrade. If that doesnt work then do a faster hard drive. If I still need more than do a processor. I have faith in the 6800gt she has. Although that may be the problem I know. I just dont think it is.

Dave

Skuzzy · « **Reply #14 on:** December 26, 2006, 04:42:19 PM »

The RAM specificaion (i.e. PC2700, PC3200...) is just that. It just means the RAM can run at 133Mhz (PC2700) or 200Mhz (PC3200).

What speed the RAM runs at is the clock rate the memory bus is set to. If the memory bus rate is 133Mhz, then the PC2700 RAM is already running at maximum speed, and changing it to PC3200 wll do nothing.

If the memory bus can run at 200Mhz, then you will get a boost in performance by going to PC3200.

This all presumes the memory bus rate your motherboard is running at is set to whatever the RAM will allow. Which means, right now, it is running at 133Mhz.