Recent content by Scougs

You should check your motherboard manual, but to my knowledge there are no motherboards that will allow you to use DDR and DDR2 simultaneously. If I'm not mistaken you have to stick with one type of RAM on the boards that allow use of both kinds. They make those types of boards so that people...

I'm not so sure that I agree with Yoosty's advice. I would first ask you what motherboard/chipset are you running on. The fact that you are running PC2700 suggests that having so called matched memory may make absolutely no difference.

Should you overclock? It really isn't a matter of should. You can actually overclock for free. You just won't get as big of an overclock on a given set of hardware. To get a good overclock you need a decent heatsink/fan and you need good case airflow. One final thing is that your other...

It could be a long shot, but make sure that your driver settings are set to let applications control AA and AF levels. It seems to me that I've had bad performance when the drivers and the game settings don't agree.

I'm almost in the same boat you are with my desktop computer. I've got a P4 2.8C (Northwood and 800fsb) with 2x512 DDR400 and X800GTO (unlocked to 16 pipelines). Unfortunately, unless you have a pretty low budget and don't expect to build new for quite a while you would be better off saving...

Without knowing what CPU you have now, it is hard to recommend what you should do. The X2 3800+ may not actually be an upgrade when it comes to CPU performance as it is only clocked at 1.8GHz. I don't believe that being dual core will help you much in game performance.

I'm really not sure if that is a reasonable score. My laptop with a Pentium M 2.13GHz, 1GB DDR2-533, and GF Go6800 overclocked gets a little over 2100. I can't remember what my desktop gets. Keep in mind that your CPU is no longer a power house. My desktop has a 2.8C and I've sucessfully...

If you don't do anything more advanced than internet browsing, pretty much any CPU will work. A dual core CPU like a Core 2 will make the system more responsive. Make sure you get plenty of RAM. 1GB is good for general use on XP. Can't speak for Vista as I have no experience with it yet.

It sounds to me like you forgot to connect something else properly. Like the hard drive. Either the power connector or the data cable. Are you using a SATA or IDE boot drive?

Overall good post, but if I'm not mistaken RAID 5 does provide some performance enhancement. Not as fast as RAID 0 but better than a single drive or RAID 1.

I think it would be worth trying if you have enough time to do it. Depending on what chipset you have, it may only run at 400fsb even though the CPU is rated at 533 which would result in the CPU running at 2.3GHz. If the CPU doesn't work for some reason, then just put the old CPU back in.

I would be very surprised if you did any damage you only got up to 60C. The old P4s like my Northwood C would easily pass 60C when doing moderate processing on the stock heatshink. They were designed to shut down automatically at 80C to prevent thermal damage. I don't know how the thermal...

I'm not too much of an expert on the newer motherboards, but I did notice that Intel's new P35 chipset seems to have some performance benefits and will be more upgradable.

I used coolbits (free download). It adds a menu to the driver settings. I've got it overclocked from 290core/590mem to 350core/700mem. I also have done the pin-mod to get a Pentium M 725 to run at 2.13GHz.

They are correct. Pitty too because the 865PE and the P4s from that erra were decent overclockers. I've got a 2.8C that will run 3.5GHz without any voltage increase.