Bottlenecks

[chemicallymark]

Hi,

How do you know/figure out what the bottleneck on your PC is?

I have an Abit NF7-S 2.0 running a Athlon 2800 XP-M @ between 2400-2600Mhz, stable.

I have 2x512MB Crucial Ballistix RAM sticks.

Would my rig be able to handle a 7800GS AGP graphics card?

There is no point upgrading the card if the CPU can't handle it...

Thoughts :?:

Thanks!
Mark

 

[bourgeoisdude]

Technically it can if it is an AGP 4X or AGP 8X slot. Ensure at least 350W power supply, depending on the rest of your system. AGP 4X will not noticeably limit the speed of the video card and 4X slots work with 8X cards. Power supply and system cooling are your primary concern, also update your AGP/Mobo chipset drivers before installing the new vid card. If currently using ATI video, remove all ATI tools/drivers from the system before installing the card as well.

What's the bottleneck? Difficult to answer. There are diag utilities built in Windows 2000/XP that can help you identify it. I'm assuming you use it for gaming? 90% of the time it is the video card or video drivers. With the new vid card, your chipset and bios compatability/config will affect gaming speed the most. RAM is okay, although I've been told that FEAR and some other brand new games will prefer slightly more RAM.

Also whats the existing video card you use?

 

[chemicallymark]

I have a Gainward 6600GT GS GLH and it's pretty cool! Although it gets eaten by 3Dmark05 and 3Dmark06...Gainward are great.

I have a 520W psu so that's cool and whenever I install new drivers I use "DriverCleaner Pro 1.5".

I could prolly do with more RAM to be fair.

Thanks for you thoughts.

 

[MxM]

Recently I have done similar exercise trying to understand if I need to upgrade my 6800gt to 7800gs. The answer for me was no, because in my case the bottleneck is the processor 2.6MHz P4, and I expect to see only moderate 10 to 20% improvement in fps on average.

So, if you already have 6800gt or 6800ultra, then I do not recommend you to upgrade, but from any other NVIDIA card (or ATI equivalent) definitely use 7800gs. In your case the processor is slightly faster, so it is less of bottleneck for you.