Gaming advice please

[James07]

Me and a friend have got speaking to an old sweedish friend this evening and started playing counter strike source again haha!

My computer was given to me and is crud, i was getting around 30fps haha

amd 3500, 2gb ram, crappy old AGP graphics etc running windows 7

NOWWWW, if i were to buy a new gfx, say something around the region of 30-50 quid would it increase my fps? or should i get a new pc haha

current gfx is a 7600gt

 

[Subliminal Aura]

I managed to pick up an 8800GT from the MM for £15 Cracking card at that price.

Even at £20 it's worth a shot... Just make sure your PSU can handle it ?

 

[James07]

Ha good point, im sure it can handle it, i just want it to be a good 50fps difference to make it worthwhile, just dont know what cards to be looking at, especially as its a vga..

 

[James07]

AGP graphics card i meant

 

[Subliminal Aura]

Passmark thinks the 8800gt is at least 2.5x faster than the 7600gt and considering CS is such a naff game (no offence, I meant not demanding) I would expect you'll get a decent bump.

AGP graphics card i meant

Oooooo errrrrr - scrap that .... Get out with yah !!!!

Yeah, no point throwing money down the pan with AGP then - get yourself a nice shiny new box

 

[James07]

Passmark thinks the 8800gt is at least 2.5x faster than the 7600gt and considering CS is such a naff game (no offence, I meant not demanding) I would expect you'll get a decent bump.



Oooooo errrrrr - scrap that .... Get out with yah !!!!

Yeah, no point throwing money down the pan with AGP then - get yourself a nice shiny new box

I was thinking that lol, this sucks ass but it was free so.. ill get a new comp once ive bought a car

 

[arc@css]

A better card like that should give it a boost, but remember, CSS is cpu dependent rather than gpu. You might be best off just overclocking the cpu first before spending anything; make sure to keep an eye on the temps with something like coretemp.

 

[Marine-RX179]

Actually if he wants ok gaming performance, he would have to upgrade from his single core CPU to at least a dual-core.

I also have the Athlon 3500+, and back then, it would bottleneck even my 8800GTS 320MB in even Counter Strike Source, and frame rate would oftenve dip to around as low as 18-19fps. It was after I upgraded to Q6600 overclocked to 3.0GHz that my fps went up to 50fps+.

 

[HangTime]

To be honest you have a pretty well balanced system at present, so I wouldn't waste money on a gfx card upgrade. The only things that are significantly faster than a 7600GT are some of the modern AMD cards (46x0) which are over your £50 budget, overpriced for what they are, couldn't be moved to a new system if you upgraded and would simply move the bottleneck to the CPU anyway (especially in a game like CSS).

Your system needs a complete overhaul and rather than buying a new GPU one option might be to scour the MM for people offloading some old gear. I'd imagine you could probably pickup a complete S775 kit (mobo, C2D/Q, DDR2) fairly cheap and then add a second hand gfx card, something like a GTX2xx.

 

[James07]

To be honest you have a pretty well balanced system at present, so I wouldn't waste money on a gfx card upgrade. The only things that are significantly faster than a 7600GT are some of the modern AMD cards (46x0) which are over your £50 budget, overpriced for what they are, couldn't be moved to a new system if you upgraded and would simply move the bottleneck to the CPU anyway (especially in a game like CSS).

Your system needs a complete overhaul and rather than buying a new GPU one option might be to scour the MM for people offloading some old gear. I'd imagine you could probably pickup a complete S775 kit (mobo, C2D/Q, DDR2) fairly cheap and then add a second hand gfx card, something like a GTX2xx.

Okay ty for the info, i think ill just leave it for now and buy a whole new rig at somepoint.