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| Hey All,
I have an older system as I don't get much money to spend on toys
anymore 
I don't think I will be able to upgrade everything for PCI E for some
time.
I currently have a P4 3Ghz and a 9800XT - I mainly play lomac but it
still slows down when it get's busy - exactly when I need it not too!
I was thinking of buying the Nvidia 7800GS card as an upgrade - will
this make much difference? I heard it was pretty awesome and it's
mainly for lomac.
I don't run with all of the effects on but i need a constant 30 frames
1280 x 1024...
What do you think?
James
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| Andrew MacPherson 2006-02-26, 7:52 pm |
| vedder@transfieldservices.com (Lawsy) wrote:
quote:
> I don't run with all of the effects on but i need a constant
> 30 frames 1280 x 1024...
LOMAC eats CPU and GPU power. Upgrade one and you'll wish you'd upgraded
the other... you never win. :-) It's also important to remember that at
1024x768 the 9800XT is still a great card. When I changed from a 9700Pro
to an X800Pro the biggest thing that changed was that I could fly fairly
smoothly at 1280x1024 (or even 1600x1200 in a simple A2A mission)
instead of 1024. Frame rates didn't shift significantly, especially in
busy situations at low level, though the 256Mb onboard may help smooth
things out a little.
This is on a 2.2GHz Athlon FWIW.
Andrew McP
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| Peasant 2006-02-26, 7:52 pm |
| Andrew MacPherson wrote:
quote:
> LOMAC eats CPU and GPU power. Upgrade one and you'll wish you'd upgraded
> the other... you never win. :-) It's also important to remember that at
> 1024x768 the 9800XT is still a great card. When I changed from a 9700Pro
> to an X800Pro the biggest thing that changed was that I could fly fairly
> smoothly at 1280x1024 (or even 1600x1200 in a simple A2A mission)
> instead of 1024. Frame rates didn't shift significantly, especially in
> busy situations at low level, though the 256Mb onboard may help smooth
> things out a little.
>
> This is on a 2.2GHz Athlon FWIW.
>
> Andrew McP
I upgraded from P4 2.66@3.0ghz w/9800pro 128mb to AMD64 3500+ w/X800XL
256mb and afterwards all I could say is, "what a waste of money that
was". In Silent Hunter III I saw zero frame rate increase (benchmarked
on both systems), none of my games seem any faster to me. I may be able
to up the res a bit and use AA more often but that wasn't worth the
time, effort or cost. Upgrading PC's every 6 months for games is a mug's
game. Some people say don't upgrade unless you are going to double the
performance, think I'll try and use that rule from now on.
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| Mitch_A 2006-02-26, 7:52 pm |
| With upgrade choices like that no wonder youre a Peasant ;) Many here would
have gladly pointed you in the right direction me tinks.
Mitch
"Peasant" <poor@peasant.here> wrote in message >
quote:
> I upgraded from P4 2.66@3.0ghz w/9800pro 128mb to AMD64 3500+ w/X800XL
> 256mb and afterwards all I could say is, "what a waste of money that was".
> In Silent Hunter III I saw zero frame rate increase (benchmarked on both
> systems), none of my games seem any faster to me. I may be able to up the
> res a bit and use AA more often but that wasn't worth the time, effort or
> cost. Upgrading PC's every 6 months for games is a mug's game. Some people
> say don't upgrade unless you are going to double the performance, think
> I'll try and use that rule from now on.
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| Andrew MacPherson 2006-02-26, 7:52 pm |
| poor@peasant.here (Peasant) wrote:
quote:
> I may be able to up the res a bit and use AA more often
> but that wasn't worth the time, effort or cost.
After very extensive research in recent weeks, I tend to agree. However
I should confess that I'm hovering on the brink of buying a CPU &
motherboard. Haven't quite decided whether I can justify a x2 CPU for my
movie making (Fraps can use the spare core very nicely), so I may just
go with a highly overclockable single core for less money.
Part of my motivation is my movie making (which cripples my PC at times)
and part is a masochistic streak in me wanting to prove to myself that
current hardware really *isn't* worth the money. Fortunately if I'm right
an Asrock AGP/PCI-E motherboard and re-using my RAM will make it a
fairly cheap "sidegrade".
Andrew McP
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| Peasant 2006-02-26, 7:52 pm |
| Mitch_A wrote:
quote:
> With upgrade choices like that no wonder youre a Peasant ;) Many here would
> have gladly pointed you in the right direction me tinks.
>
> Mitch
Yep, upgrading computer hardware keeps me poor alright. :-) I bought the
vid card last summer and the mb and cpu last Nov. What upgrade path
would you have chosen? From everything I've read I did make the right
choices for the time but the bang for buck just wasn't there, IMO. It's
people on usenet that gave me the idea to switch from P4 to AMD64 as
they made it sound like it was a much faster cpu for gaming. Now that I
changed the cpu I think they are full of shit and the difference is minor.
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| Peasant 2006-02-26, 7:52 pm |
| Andrew MacPherson wrote:
quote:
>Fortunately if I'm right
> an Asrock AGP/PCI-E motherboard and re-using my RAM will make it a
> fairly cheap "sidegrade".
>
> Andrew McP
That's the motherboard I bought. Lots of people like it but I'm
wondering if the AGP implementation they used is holding back my X800XL.
I notice a slight hitching in some games that I never had when using the
9800pro on an Abit IC7 mb.Could be because I used the Asrock provided
agp drivers instead of the Ali integrated drivers - maybe. I want to get
a PCI-E card to see if that is the case but I'm really trying hard to
hold back on getting a new vid card until DX10 and Vista are out. Don't
want to go from being a simple peasant to homeless either.
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| Andrew MacPherson 2006-02-26, 7:52 pm |
| poor@peasant.here (Peasant) wrote:
quote:
> Could be because I used the Asrock provided
> agp drivers instead of the Ali integrated drivers - maybe
That sounds like the most likely culprit. I've read of similar problems
with AGP performance, possibly as a result of installing drivers in the
wrong order. Anyway, there's nothing whatsoever wrong with my X800Pro,
so I'm not heading for PCI-E any time soon. My LOMAC problems are
definitely CPU related, and I'm not expecting to see significant
improvement unless I can get close to 3GHz from an overclocked CPU.
The tricky part is getting as close to that 3GHz as possible without
having to sell a kidney. I'm much more likely to reach 2.5GHz and be
very disappointed. :-)
Andrew McP
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| Andrew MacPherson 2006-02-26, 7:52 pm |
| poor@peasant.here (Peasant) wrote:
quote:
> Lots of people like it but I'm wondering if the AGP
> implementation they used is holding back my X800XL.
You're probably already aware of threads like this, but just in case
you're not...
http://www.ocworkbench.com/ocwbcgi/...opic;f=30;t=005
271;p=0
Andrew McP
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