What do I upgrade? Where is my bottle-neck?

[skinny47]

Hey forum

My system is about 5 yrs old, and i'm just wondering if I can make it a bit faster by upgrading or overclocking.........just wondering where is my bottle-neck, or where should I start.......Should I even bother to spend any more on the system?..........Should I just save up to put together another system? I play several games, (Fear, Half-Life 2, Doom 3, but mostly Madden 06) Any help whould be great.........here's what I have:

AMD Athlon XP 2200+
Thermaltake Volcano 9 CPU Fan
Soyo KT400 Dragon Ultra Plat. Ed. Mobo
2 Sticks of 512MB Corsair PC2700 CAS2 Ram
ATI Radeon 9700 PRO (128MB) Video Card
ATI HDTV Wonder Tuner Card
Proview RX326 LCD HDTV Monitor

 

[michaelahess]

My wife has an almost identical system except it's a 2600, it plays doom3 and everything fine, not maxed out mind you but still very well. Do those games run poorly, or are you just planning for the future? The vid card would be the largest bottleneck for most games, the proc would be next. You could get a better vid card but since agp is going away, I'd save for a new mobo, proc, and vid card, if you got a socket 939 board you could still use the ram.

 

[skinny47]

Thanks for the reply........

Ya games are pretty smooth, just recently however Madden 06 grinds to turtle speeds for a couple seconds and then returns to normal........only occasionally. Just curious to see if I could make the whole system run a bit quicker...........would adding another stick of 512MB of Ram do anything? If you were to add a better video card what would it be without overkill (considering I have a XP 2200+ CPU)?

 

[chuckshissle]

I would say upgrade your cpu and graphics card and with that you should be able all games to include FEAR and BF2. However it's better if you just build a new one. 5 years is more than a computer's shelf life considering you want to be able to run the latest softwares and hardwares.

If you want to build a new system then I have couple of suggestion and get the best bang for the buck hardwares. A socket 939 pci-e motherboard, AMD Athlon 64 3200+ cpu, used the old ram and get two of the same ram to get a total of 2Gb, 7900GT 256Mb graphics card and you know the rest. With it you should be able to play the latest games with good quality and performance.