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Old midrange + Source games

SeeKified

SeeKified

SeeKified

Associate
Joined
2 Dec 2010
Posts
771
Location
Edinburgh
My girlfriend's setup is as follows:

Athlon64 3000+
7600GS
2GB DDR (PC-3200)

Now, we play a lot of TF2, L4D and L4D2 and I really think that, despite the fact that the hardware wasn't in the high-end segment even when it came out a few years back, it should perform better than it is, especially her graphics card.

What I don't get is that she has roughly the same FPS regardless of settings. In TF2 with everything on Low or None, she gets way below 20 FPS if there's a few other players on screen. Strangely, the FPS doesn't decrease much if we turn settings up to Medium-High.

Any ideas? We've tried a few different drivers (including the old 187.45) but that didn't really help all that much.
 
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I would seriously consider an upgrade. The 7600GS is a pretty awful card for gaming, and a single core AMD 3000+ is no where near optimal.

Hell, my missus' PC would walk over that with change to spare, and I'm considering upgrading her current PC which is an E5200, 4GB DDR2 800 and 8800GS based PC.

If you can't afford new, then maybe the second hand market might help you out with a GPU upgrade at the very least, but would depend on the motherboard which could very well likely be a AGP based board.
 
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Oh yeah, we'll be upgrading in a couple of months, don't worry. :) In the meantime though, her L4D performance is severely impaired by not seeing things until after they've happened. I'm currently on a 3700+ (overclocked to 2.9GHz) and a X1900XT and they're doing the job well enough. I just didn't think there was such a huge gap between a 7600GS and the X1900XT.

But yeah, we'll either be getting some Phenom 2 stuff and HD6xxx cards, or wait for Bulldozer (depends on when it's launched though). :)
 
SeeKified said:
Oh yeah, we'll be upgrading in a couple of months, don't worry. :) In the meantime though, her L4D performance is severely impaired by not seeing things until after they've happened. I'm currently on a 3700+ (overclocked to 2.9GHz) and a X1900XT and they're doing the job well enough. I just didn't think there was such a huge gap between a 7600GS and the X1900XT.

But yeah, we'll either be getting some Phenom 2 stuff and HD6xxx cards, or wait for Bulldozer (depends on when it's launched though). :)
Click to expand...

There's a certain well known high street computer pawn shop that could probably sort you out a 2nd hand video card that would easily solve L4D problems for the short term, something like:

ATI: X1800XT, X1900XT, X1900XTX or higher
Nvidia: 8800GS, 8800GT or higher

That AMD 3000 could also do with some overclocking as well to get some more juice out of it.
 
My sister had a 7600GT until recently, and L4D2 ran fine in 1080p. She was on a dual core though which must have made the difference. She's just grabbed a second hand 9500GT and it's made a big difference. Only cost £20ish.

You could try a cheap gfx upgrade, but by the sounds of it, that CPU is the hold up.
 
As much as I'd love to overclock the crap out of the 3000+, the motherboard's an HP OEM. :(

I guess Source really likes multicore CPUs. I think we'll just sit tight for another couple of months and get a big upgrade for us both. I'm not really a fan of second hand, but I'll have a look. :)
 
Please pardon the bump, but I just had a thought... the computer in question's got a no-name 300W PSU. Might that cause any problems or should that be enough? There's two hard drives, card readers and a bunch of USB peripherals in there as well.
 
Online games will like cpu power and the source engine is good example of this. In the mean time before you upgrade and if you have sufficient cooling, I'd overclock the cpu as someone else suggested.
 
I'm going to tell you my pass experience for your reference as you might find useful.

Back then, I was on the Athlon64 3500+ (2.2GHz single-core) with a ATI X1600XT gaming at 1280x1024 res. I upgraded from the ATI X1600XT to a 8800GTS 320MB, and my frame rate was still poor on CSS with frame rate dipping to below 20fps. After I upgrade to the 775 platform with the Q6600, the frame rate skyrocketed and it had barely dipped below 50fps ever since.

So my recommendation for you is if you want to be able to play source games at decent level without spending a fortunate on upgrade, may be you should try to buy a 2nd hand Athlon64 X2 CPU for around £20 may be and see how it goes from there...if it's still not good enough, you could then may be upgrade the graphic card to a 2nd hand 8800GT/9800GT for around £35.
 
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