Aging P4 Machine - Spec Me Upgrade!

[Nucleo]

Hi all

Right, here is my current spec of my computers

Gaming Comp - Some full system build from a big computer retailer
Pentium 4 3.0Ghz with H/t
1GB Geil PC3200 Ram
250GB HD 7200RPM IDE
Geforce 6800NU
DVD-RW
Some Generic Motherboard

Render Rig
2x Intel Xeon 2.4ghz - OC'd to 3.0Ghz
2GB PC3200 Ram
80GB 7200RPM HD
ATI 9200se
CD-Rom
Asus NCCH-DL

Okay, im a student at college, going to uni next year. I play a lot of CSS, my gaming comp just doesn't seem to cope at all anymore. I do a lot of 3d graphic design and rendering, so i put the render comp together for about £500 last year.

What I want to do is upgrade my Gaming comp to cope with CSS and future games, but I dont want to break the bank

So, What i have planned is something like this:
- get a new motherboard with PCI-E
- new CPU... what type, god knows, good for gaming and general windows use
- Use the existing RAM for now
- Sort out some SATA drives
- Maybe a new vid card, I know the 6800 can play CSS nicely, but it is the cpu holding it back.
- Will need a new PSU - the generic POS in the gaming comp will probably die.
- New case

okay, can anyone spec me a nice upgrade?

keeping it on the cheap too.... any other suggestions on what i should do would be nice... Thanks all

 

[AWPC]

Just get a 7800GS AGP Gfx card as that will do you for another 12 months in gaming. I presume you probably have a 1024x768 or 1280x1024 monitor so @ those resolutions the gfx card should just about be enough. Another 1GB of Ram would also help with improving loading times/FPS as you will not need to hit the page file as often so the CPU will have less load on it.

TBH your CPU will just about cope for another 12 months with a faster gfx card as long as you compromise on some gfx settings.

As for your PSU all depends on how much money you want to spend. Should always get the best PSU you can afford as if that ever fails it can take your mobo+ram+cpu+gfx card with it!

Browse the hardware forum here as it is a common question which comes up every few days.

 

[Nucleo]

I was considering just getting a new agp graphics card, but my 6800 isn't the bottleneck in CSS.

I have the graphics on Low and it runs the same as having them on medium.

 

[AWPC]

Well it must be something else then. Last year with only a P4 3.2 H/T CPU (prescott) and 2GB Ram + AGP6800GT256 I could get Half Life2 & Lost Coast running a constant 30FPS @ 1600x1200 with 6xAA 16xAF + HDR.

So as you can see that is only 200Mhz faster than your CPU which pretty much eliminates that as a bottleneck.

Perhaps try an extra 1GB Ram. Before you do have a look @ your HD light to see how often it is flashing in CSS & or disable your pagefile then repeat the same experiment.

Not having enough physical Ram can cause FPS issues as everytime the game needs to access the pagefile the CPU needs to allocate a lot of cycles to windows for this to happen as it has to balance between the background windows services/programs vs the game requirements. Having more Ram stops this from happening as often if ever.

Quake4 for instance is almost unplayable with less than 1.5GB Ram regardless of CPU/gfx card it needs to continually access the pagefile giving a very slow FPS of between 5-10 in places (even on a 7800GTX512 as this happened to me recently when I had to RMA some ram back to ocuk so only had 1.25GB Ram instead of 2.25GB).

Most games from the last 2 years run happily with a decent gfx card & CPU which is from the same time span. As long as it can keep up with the data from the x8 AGP interface will be ok.

I have built for my brother an old P4 3.2 + ATI9600 + 512MB Ram system from old parts and that happily runs Half Life2 @ 1280x1024 with almost all the gfx settings @ max!

 

[Nucleo]

ouch... something really is wrong then

I have recently got a new hard drive

I took the 2gb of ram out of my server and stuck it in my pc last week, didn't make much difference. Mind i didn't disable the pagefile, will give that a go in a min.

One thing about CSS, often when in game, i alt+tab out and see that steam is using 50% of the cpu. I often have to close the game, restart steam and it drops back to 1%. this is a bug in steam which a lot of people know about. CSS is noticibly slower when steam is acting up, when its not, performace still isn't amazing.

im glad you have said something about the p4 being up 2 scratch. Could it be onboard sound?

I dont see it wrecking performance, but it 'could' be that. I can nick My Soundblaster Live card from my dad's pc and run sound from that.

 

[AWPC]

ouch... something really is wrong then

I have recently got a new hard drive

I took the 2gb of ram out of my server and stuck it in my pc last week, didn't make much difference. Mind i didn't disable the pagefile, will give that a go in a min.

One thing about CSS, often when in game, i alt+tab out and see that steam is using 50% of the cpu. I often have to close the game, restart steam and it drops back to 1%. this is a bug in steam which a lot of people know about. CSS is noticibly slower when steam is acting up, when its not, performace still isn't amazing.

im glad you have said something about the p4 being up 2 scratch. Could it be onboard sound?

I dont see it wrecking performance, but it 'could' be that. I can nick My Soundblaster Live card from my dad's pc and run sound from that.

Yeah onboard sound usually kills the FPS as it steals CPU cycles to process but a sblive card has its own onboard audio CPU which does make a large difference. Also defrag your HDs as that can also slowdown after a while along with clearing out all temps files and disable the indexing option for your HDs as that is useless unless you run large DB queries over a network.

 

[Nucleo]

right, just restarted and stuck the extra 2 gb of ram in, gonna give it a test run on css.

gonna wip the sblive card out tonight.

you may have just saved me a lot of money my friend

 

[AWPC]

right, just restarted and stuck the extra 2 gb of ram in, gonna give it a test run on css.

gonna wip the sblive card out tonight.

you may have just saved me a lot of money my friend

Only delayed it unfortunately as the way games dev is going fot the PC this time next year your current rig will just about run the install script!!

 

[Nucleo]

yeh, i've heard

i just want to run CSS lol.

with a total of 3gb of RAM there was still slowdowns and stutters when a few people were on screen. Still sucks.

I rekon it is the audio, When i first get into the game and fire a gun, there is a slight stutter when the gunshot is fired.

Ripping the 7.1 sblive card out tonight lol

 

[marcus_667]

i get a stutter when i first connect to servers on my sempron rig that has onboard sound a sempron 2600+ cpu @ 2.56 GHZ 9800 xt and the only time i get stuters is like i said when i first connect to servers and see their motd screen for about 2 seconds max then its all good nice solid 102 FPS but it does take some time to load the maps i put it down to my 1 meg net and me needing too defrag but being as i get new stuff next week i wont bother ill wait for my x2 and my sata hdd