Crap Computer, But This Is Terrible!

[CaptainVincent]

Hey guys.

I just got a cheap used computer to play old games like FarCry and Doom 3 on.

It has A Pentium 4 1.7Ghz, Radeon 9600 256MB And 1.25GB RAM.

I understand this isn't a great system at all but it should be able to play these games, I mean at least on medium settings. But I go to play Farcry and at 800x600 with medium settings the frame rate drops as low as 10 frames per second!!, On Doom 3 with low settings 640x480 it drops as low as 8 frames per second!

Surely there must be some sort of problem thats not hardware related?

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[Kkkk1]

nope,
A Radeon 9600 is ancient and was never really a gamer card anyway. My laptop which isn't a gaming laptop gets around those frames and it's using a crappy ATi 320m video card. I would give it up as a bad job.

 

[stemnin]

lol, no, thats really old hardware and those games (although old, but not that old) stressed systems of their day and age.

 

[bfellow]

A P4 1.7 is like a standard 2002 office PC and Radeon 9600 makes my X1600 PRO look like its on steroids

 

[cruiseoveride]

the 1.7ghz is fine, but that 9600 is not worth 2c

 

[spuddyt]

it really wouldn't cost much to get something like a 7600.... or even something less powerful....

 

[cfvh600]

Upgrade your graphics card. It should make a noticable improvement.

 

[tenaciousleydead]

Overclock,overclock,overclock. Also optimize, ive never really liked having a really high end system that can run everything at max flawlessly. Part of the fun of owning a pc is you can always tweak things. if anything bite the bullet and go for a 6600Gt for around 25-30 bucks.

 

[thesmokingman14]

dOOd, don't overclock, that's not the problem. It's like everyone else says, you need a decent graphics card. That 9600 sucked even back when it was new. The 9800 Pro slayed the 9600....and that was YEARS ago.

 

[itotallybelieveyou]

Upgrade the gfx card

 

[tlmck]

I played both of those games at 800x600 on medium settings on a Sapphire version of that card. The difference was, I had an AMD 2600+ with 1gb PC2700 ram, and was running Windows XP SP1. If you have XP SP2, it really slows an old machine down. After running it for a week or so, I wiped the HD and reinstalled SP1, and turned off the update feature.

 

[tkpb938]

get the x1600 pro for those games. I'm running it and an overclocked sempron 2600, and I get between 30 and 60 on doom3 800x600 and around 40 on half life 2.