System Performance

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Scotteh

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Feb 13, 2006
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I don't know if this is in the right forum, so i'll post it here for now.

My friend recently bought a system, what i thought to be quite powerful. Core specs for it are as follows:-

<b>(System 1)
P4 3.4Ghz 800Mhz FSB 2mb cache (not sure of the chip number - not a 550, possible a 6xx series)
2Gb DDR2 RAM
360GB Serial ATA HD 7200rpm
ATi Radeon x600 PCI-E 256mb Gfx</b>

He got a good deal for the price (£800) i thought. However, when we went to test this monster for its gaming prowess, it proved quite lacklustre. F.E.A.R, a real system drain, seemed like a good place to start. We banged all the settings up to max and watched a highly detailed powerpoint presentation. Only when we put the settings to medium (800x600 res!) could we get a steady 40fps. "This isn't right" i thought to myself, even my system can run it better than this. For reference my system is as follows:-

<b>(System 2)
P4 3.4Ghz (i believe this is an older chip to the one above - p4 550)
1Gb DDR RAM
2 x 200GB SCSI HD
GeForce 6600 AGP 256mb</b>

Assuming F.E.A.R was just incapable of running smooth with all settings on, we embarked on a test with 3d mark 05. It was obvious my friends system was struggling from the start. In the end our scores were:-

<b>System 1 (friends) - 1450
System 2 (mine) - 2051</b>

Which now brings me to my question. Whats going wrong here? On paper he has the better system, surely? Any ideas? We both have to latest gfx drivers for our cards and are both running identical OS' (Win XP Home).
 
Your buddy's graphics card is the one bottlenecking the performance. With a 7800 GT card your friends rig would be smoking fast. It will play BF2 and FEAR with an eye-candy and great performance.
 
Yep agree, they would be fast gaming machines with better grapics cards,
The current gpraphics cards are total bottlenecks for decent gaming performance.

Your 6600gt is a better card than the x600 hence why your 3dmark score is higher.

To play fear at high you need a 7800gt £200 or x1800xl £200 or higher e.g x1800xt £300, x1900xt £350.

Welcome to the world of high end gaming where it costs a lot.
 
Yeah, i was thinking it was the gfx card. I'm an Nvidia whore so i'm not too hot with radeon performance. What's the x600 equivalent in the Nvidia range?

Gfx card upgrade will have to wait for me tho 🙁

Also, related note, are my SCSI HD's slowing my rig down? Never had a scsi based system before so i don't know much about it.

Cheers so far fellas!
 
Do not htinkit has a direct nvidia counter part, some benchmarks its no better than the 6200, others it sits between the 6200 and the standard 6600.

I would say its the latter just better than a 6200 but not as good as the 6600.

Dont know about scsi, I wouldnt of thought it would be slowing you down though.
 
FEAR is a very graphics intensive game. I would recommend the 7800GT as a minimum to play that game. The current graphics setup is bottlenecking that system.

As far as the SCSI drives, no, they won't hurt system performance. For gaming, graphics is more or less what you need.
 
Yeah, i was thinking it was the gfx card. I'm an Nvidia whore so i'm not too hot with radeon performance. What's the x600 equivalent in the Nvidia range?

Gfx card upgrade will have to wait for me tho 🙁

Also, related note, are my SCSI HD's slowing my rig down? Never had a scsi based system before so i don't know much about it.

Cheers so far fellas!
Click to expand...

SCSI might be slowing things down. I'm assuming you're using a PCI SCSI card? If so you're limited to 133MB/sec across the entire PCI bus. Assuming you have a PCI sound card and some form of Network card on the PCI bus you're limiting the performance right there.

Currently it would make no sense to invest in an nVidia graphics card. X1800XL's, X1800XT's, X1900XT's and X1900XTX's are where the technology, performance and image quality are at.

Of course a 7800GT may perform a tad quicker then an X1800XL but once IQ ir cranked up the 7800GT is left behind. Especially with the newer Catalyst 6.2 drivers. You also get high quality AF (filtering method above anything nVidia can offer quality wise) and Adaptive AA that doesn't make the SuperSampled textures grow in size (like nVidia's does in games such as HL2 and BF2)... oh did I forget you can also do HDR with MSAA (Multisampling AA) on all X1x00 hardware... yes.. nVidia are playing second fiddle right now.
 
Great stuff guys, thanks a lot, just a quick one while i have some attention.

Bearing in mind i have a 6600 AGP, what are my upgrade options in AGP for noticeable improvements?
 
As others have said F.E.A.R. takes a very good GPU to run smoothly and at higher resolutions.

The 7800GS is a valid upgrade to your 6600

If you want ot get better than that you would really need to make the jump to PCIe.
 
Give it a couple of weeks for the 7800GS to hit the shelves over there. It just come out here not so long ago. Or you could order it from here in the land of bread and butter and 7800GS! naaa That would be expensive for shipping. So just be patient, cuz good things comes to who wait.

But Craig suggestion is also good that is if you want to swap to a pci-e. But that would cost lots of pounds or euro. Anyhow the 7800GS would run BF2 and FEAR with good quality at 1024x768 resolution. Just upgrade your ram to 2Gb and you have better performance in games.
 
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