Hardware advice needed

[Evil Weasel 0]

This isn't strictly an OFP question,although I suppose it does refer to pc performance when running flashpoint.

I've put my own pc together over the last couple of years,buying what I could afford at the time and replacing components one by one.

The specs are :-

AMD Athlon 2000 chip

Jetway KT266 motherboard (133 MHz I think)

1 Gig ram (2100 DDR I think-the cheapest DDR anyway)

Geforce Ti 4200 128 Mb graphics card

V.cheap Mercury soundcard

One 40 gig and one 20 gig hard drive

Windows XP pro

It runs OFP reasonably well,giving a mark of arounnd 4200.

Although I have enough knowledge to put it all together,I don't actually know that much about pc performance,so my questions for all you OFP pc experts are-

1.Are any of the components obviously weaker than the rest,dragging the overall performance down?

2.If I was to spend about Å100 (about 150 euros) on improving it,what would be best to replace-i.e. what would give me most bang for my buck?

Any advice willl be gratefully accepted,ta  

[theavonlady 2]

The components sound quite decent. If you're happy with it, then save the Å100 for something else. Why force yourself to waste good money?

[Placebo 31]

Moving to OT.

[JAP 2]

I think all that you could buy for 150€ would be a nice shiny 80 Gb HDD drive U-ATA 7200 RPM.

Maybe it ll improve loading times slightly.

Couldnt think of anything else for that money that could have affect on your system's performance.

Cheers

[shadow 6]

A faster vid-card would help. I got a GF4Ti4600 myself, but I'm waiting for Nvidia and ATI to release their next-gen cards (april/may). Then the current top of the line cards will drop considerably in price.

Like JAP says: a new and faster H-D will improve load-times. But if you're buying a new drive today I'd get a SATA-drive because they are alot faster and all new motherboards today come with SATA-controllers onboard. The SATA-drives costs approx the same as a regular IDE. A SATA-controller card costs approx 20-30$

[joltan 0]

Get a cheap hard disk (80 GB cost about 60 Euro - probably cheaper in the US) to replace the 20GB drive and a good middle class Dx9 gfx card (see if you can get a Radeon 9600 Pro). That should give you a decent upgrade at about 150 Euro costs.

You could also swap your motherboard for a dual channel (nforce chipset) as 1GB ram (2x 512mb I assume) in a single channel board (KT-266 chipset) won't give you the best performance. Also newer mobos support AGP 8x - good if you buy a new gfx card. But then you'd also need new ram, etc. - you'd end up with a decent system, but also with a bill of way over the amount you are willing to shell out.

If you are thinking about it then look wether your dealer has a good offer for a bundle of mobo+cooler+ram+cpu (Barton instead of the old TB). You could even build a new pc and sell the old one to pay off the extra costs...

I just 'updated' my old machine and ended up with keeping nothing but a hard drive and the gfx card - now I have two computers (still had an old GF4). Total investment 400 Euro for a new case, a nforce2 mobo with bells & wistles, an 80GB hd, 2GB ddr400, AthlonXP 2600 cpu (Barton) and a cooler. I guess I could still sell the old XP2400TB with a KT266A mobo and a GF4Ti gfx card for over 250 Euros...

[Evil Weasel 0]

Thanks for the advice so far and Avon,your probably right,I should just save the money-but hey,who's sensible when it comes to computers?

Joltan do you think that a better motherboard would make a big difference? I must admit that one of the things that got me thinking was the disapointing increase in performance when I doubled the ram from 512Mb to 1Gb.

As for the hard disk,I've got loads of space left (mainly due to one of the drives crashing a few weeks back ). Is there any point swapping in purely performance terms?

Bring those answers on

[shadow 6]

Is there any point swapping in purely performance terms?

Bring those answers on

Simplest single piece of hardware: video-card.

But you will not get a WOW-experience because then your CPU and bus-speed will be the bottleneck.

So if you are upgrading one thing at a time I suggest a new video-card. But I would wait untill Nvidia and Ati release their next gen cards.

[Lucretius 0]

that horrible ddr 2100 is a big bottleneck.

Your best bet would be an n-force 2 motherboard and 512-1gb of DDR 2700.

The rest of your setup is fine for now.

I used to have the exact system just mentioned with a 2000 processor and ge-force ti-4200

It ran the game fairly well as long as AA and AF were disabled

[toadeater 0]

A faster vid-card would help. I got a GF4Ti4600 myself, but I'm waiting for Nvidia and ATI to release their next-gen cards (april/may). Then the current top of the line cards will drop considerably in price.

A 4200 is good enough for OFP, especially if you overclock it. Without AA/AF, it's faster than a 5600. You won't see much of a difference with newer cards unless you use AA/AF because OFP is a DX7 game and doesn't take advantage of the capabilities of newer cards.

With the setup listed, I dunno what would give a significant improvement in this case. The limitation is the motherboard, CPU & memory combo, not just one thing. Memory holds back a new CPU purchase because you'll need PC2700 at least. If you get faster memory, then you could TRY to overclock the CPU a couple of hundred MHz, but I have doubts about that motherboard being able to handle it.

I'd save up my money 'til all three of those things could be replaced.

[shadow 6]

A 4200 is good enough for OFP...

Yes, Suma and I discussed some fps-matters about OFP earlier and we concluded with it being a CPU-matter and not video-card-matter. In other words: a GF4Ti is more than enough for OFP. It's the CPU-speed and bus-speed that holds OFP back.