Captain Maxx Power
08-05-2007, 09:53 PM
Seeing as how my foray into YahooAnswers has come up with a string of "upgrd ur pc noob, lol" type response, I felt it necessary to head somewhere where I know people who have at least half a brain live. Not I'm suggesting any of you possess less than a full brain... :D
Anyways, I've been trying to pin down why my system seemed to have problems rendering some games. To this end I downloaded a 3D Benchmark program (specficially 3DMark2006) to test it up against any changes I made. One reinstalled/cleaned drivers, flashed BIOS, defragmented drive and "zomg there's TWO power cables on my video card?" moment later, and I'd only seen a small benchmark boost of maybe a couple of points.
Stricken, I decided to compare my results to others on the interwebs as the realisation that perhaps it was upgrade time was dawning on me. On checking my results I soon found out that something was very wrong. Alongside rigs that were identical or close to identical (perhaps like .03 extra Ghz on the processor, really very minor stuff) my system is underperforming - drastically. My score was around 2400; theirs was nearer 3800. ohmy.gif
The weaker link seems to be my CPU. On doing a CPU test my score was a paultry 360. Compared to my other results (around about 1700 for one video test, 1800 for another) it seems remarakbly low. When observing the tests I noticed that the CPU test seemed to chug quite spectactularly (20 frames of animation taking three minutes to render).
So, here's what I've got installed;
Radeon X1950 Pro 256Mb
1Gb DDR2 RAM (two sticks)
Intel 4 3.00Ghz
SATA HD w/ 2Gb Page File and 25% disk space free
P5GDC ASUS motherboard
450W PSU (it may be worth mentioning it has a habit of buzzing sometimes, though there's no real pattern to it. Something like HL2 and it'll be fine, but load up D2 and it goes bonkers)
Now before anyone suggests anything, this is what I've tried so far;
Driver wipe/update
Windows update
BIOS update
Cleaning components (as in shoving a hover down there)
Removing Spyware/Adware/Viruses
Removing obsolete registry entries
Removing unnecessary services/boot-up programs
Tomorrow I'm going to be going to pick up a new HD regardless since I'm always running out of space on my current HD. I'd really like to be able to pick up something, if only to test and see what's going on. Bare in mind that I have no money whatsoever to spend on components; the government's been jolly nice and given me sod all to live off of for university for the next year, and I don't currently work. In other words, I needs that money for food. I'd rather go hungry than upgrade. So really I'm looking more for technologically based advice rather than simple "go upgrade" comments.
Thanks in advanced for any and all help given. :cool:
Anyways, I've been trying to pin down why my system seemed to have problems rendering some games. To this end I downloaded a 3D Benchmark program (specficially 3DMark2006) to test it up against any changes I made. One reinstalled/cleaned drivers, flashed BIOS, defragmented drive and "zomg there's TWO power cables on my video card?" moment later, and I'd only seen a small benchmark boost of maybe a couple of points.
Stricken, I decided to compare my results to others on the interwebs as the realisation that perhaps it was upgrade time was dawning on me. On checking my results I soon found out that something was very wrong. Alongside rigs that were identical or close to identical (perhaps like .03 extra Ghz on the processor, really very minor stuff) my system is underperforming - drastically. My score was around 2400; theirs was nearer 3800. ohmy.gif
The weaker link seems to be my CPU. On doing a CPU test my score was a paultry 360. Compared to my other results (around about 1700 for one video test, 1800 for another) it seems remarakbly low. When observing the tests I noticed that the CPU test seemed to chug quite spectactularly (20 frames of animation taking three minutes to render).
So, here's what I've got installed;
Radeon X1950 Pro 256Mb
1Gb DDR2 RAM (two sticks)
Intel 4 3.00Ghz
SATA HD w/ 2Gb Page File and 25% disk space free
P5GDC ASUS motherboard
450W PSU (it may be worth mentioning it has a habit of buzzing sometimes, though there's no real pattern to it. Something like HL2 and it'll be fine, but load up D2 and it goes bonkers)
Now before anyone suggests anything, this is what I've tried so far;
Driver wipe/update
Windows update
BIOS update
Cleaning components (as in shoving a hover down there)
Removing Spyware/Adware/Viruses
Removing obsolete registry entries
Removing unnecessary services/boot-up programs
Tomorrow I'm going to be going to pick up a new HD regardless since I'm always running out of space on my current HD. I'd really like to be able to pick up something, if only to test and see what's going on. Bare in mind that I have no money whatsoever to spend on components; the government's been jolly nice and given me sod all to live off of for university for the next year, and I don't currently work. In other words, I needs that money for food. I'd rather go hungry than upgrade. So really I'm looking more for technologically based advice rather than simple "go upgrade" comments.
Thanks in advanced for any and all help given. :cool: