Gaming - Jerky graphics. Please help

Gashman · 2 Apr 2006 at 00:30

pentium 4s, namely prescotts (not northwoods, they run fine) are prone to laggyness, i think its heat as well, matts computer runs doom 3 like a breeze until hes been playing for about 30 minutes, then it suddenly becomes unessecarily choppy, that never happens on my athlon, and we use same type of ram, same graphics, they need better than stock cooling, i hate to say it but intel screwed up with there stock cooling, its just not enough

if you need to upgrade to cool that pentium, zalman CNPS9500 is a cracking cooler, should keep temperatures a fair bit lower than that stock cooler, especially under load

gbdtil1 · 2 Apr 2006 at 18:43

Interesting point re. Pentiums. My Pentium 4 is the the 3 Gig 500 series. Am I right in saying that this is the Northwood variety? I understood the 600 series to be the Prescott variation and I was interested in upgrading to these (the 650 version) as its compatible with my motherboard and has level 2 cache. Is there any real (gaming) benefit in this? To clarify, are we saying the (old) Northwood (if that is the 500 series) is a better gaming chip than the newer Prescotts.

Thanks for all your input so far guys. Looks like I've got a long road ahead to fix these issues!

iraiguana · 2 Apr 2006 at 22:34

the prescotts were the old 500's northwoods were just before that and possibly into the early 500's.

basically could be that he needs a better cooling solution.
i would suggest either the artic cooler or zalman 9500.

jmhduck · 3 Apr 2006 at 10:19

NeptuneUK said:
meh. whatever. my friend had a dell. wanted to upgrade. they removed and soldered over the AGP slot... *********.
if u want to upgrade the dell yourself you void the warranty.

I never said they were upgrade friendly and don't they save about 1p for not attaching the agp slot

gbdtil1 · 3 Apr 2006 at 10:21

ok guys my final question(s) on this. Assuming I manage to uninstal my Panda security product, reformat my HD and improve the CPU cooling (which I plan to do via a new tower from NZXT and the Pro 7 arctic cooler), what are your considered opinions on the merits of upgrading my CPU to the Pentium 3.4Gig (650 series)?

When changing my tower, I will also be looking to buy a new Mobo and as I have the 7800GTX card, I will be looking for a good SLI (Pentium) compatible board as I will look to add a further xfx card in the future. As mentioned before, I'm not interested in the overclocking merits of the board as that scares the SH 1 T out of me, so I would be interested in a great board out of the box!

Thanks again for your input guys.

Gashman · 3 Apr 2006 at 13:02

going for newer 600 series might be worth it, more cache and faster clock, but you'll only be gaining 400Mhz on you core speed, for SLI if your not bothered about overclocking or anything perhaps something like a gigabyte 8N-SLI, there good board, there just nothing to write home about when overclocking, or even an asus P5ND2 SLI might be an option

iraiguana · 3 Apr 2006 at 15:57

i would feel it would probably be more worthwhile looking into getting a dual core cpu as some games are slowly becoming compatible with the future tech of these. the performance gain of 400mhz would not really be enough to warrent the new stuff and will see minial performance increase.

best sli boards are the pentiums with nf4 chipsets. i think u will need a new chip as the older models do not support the older sockets (cant remember which socket ures is but i assume it is not the 775).

look at getting the 9xx series of intel dual cores if intel is ure thing, or the amd ones are cheaper and better performing.

deadly raccoon · 3 Apr 2006 at 18:16

What is your internet conection, you could just be experiencing lag on online games. Try running BF2 on single player and see if the problem still occurs. I have the same sort of set up as you and i can run BF2 with no probs on low or medium settings. Hope this helps.