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Most Important Hardware?

S

stark

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 13, 2002
Messages
445
Not the most technical thread... I'm just curious, I know how everything works in a synergy and every bit is important when it comes to the graphics/sounds/framerate/etc...

But what single piece boosts game performance the most? RAM? Vid card? CPU clock? HD space?
 
I'd say most of the time the video card. Are you planning an upgrade? If so, what's your current specs? That'll help determine where your money is best spent.
 
Video card but any one of them can kill a video card, so if everything is decent the video card.
 
short answer

"it depends"

BF2 is showing us that even on decent systems, more RAM is better even when you have a hot vid card.

who knows what the next gen game will need (other than $bling$ that is)
 
Yeah I do plan on upgrading at some point when I have enough spare $$$. My current dying setup is:

ABIT KR7A v1.0
1.60 AMD Athlon XP
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400
512mb PC2700

It gets by on min game settings of course, then again it has pretty much been like this since 2002.
 
Ooo...in your case your bottleneck would have to be your video card. After that, I'd say a new processor is in order, and then some RAM...at least a gig, PC3200 or better.

In almost every upgrade, you're just going to be shifting the drag factor to another component, usually the CPU, RAM, or Vid Card. In this case, go in this order:

1. Video Card
2. CPU
3. RAM
 
what about the Mobo Chipset.. that is important too.. as well as the system bus speed, which is related to the chipset sorta.
 
I considered that but chances are if he makes a good upgrade his socket is probably going to change and therefore his chipset will as well by default when he gets a new board to fit the CPU :)
 
I would say Mouse and Keyboard - windows flipps out if you dont have them
 
eeyrjmr said:
I would say Mouse and Keyboard - windows flipps out if you dont have them
Click to expand...

Lol very true. These are the things we are actually interacting with everyday, yet I still see people with cheap KB/Mice, even though they got an A64 inside. Its kind of a mystery actually.
 
Good point...in fact, I'd say even more important is a power cord.

Well, even then we could say electricity. Don't pay the bills = the lights go out! :eek:

Actually, wouldn't life have to be in there too? I know they're working on a way to insert the dead into MMORPGs, but that's a ways off...
 
i know this thread is about hardware, but its good to point out that without proper software configuration, (i.e., Windows management in regards to services running and what not) you can have the latest and greatest hardware and still have poor gaming performance.
 
Tetrahedron said:
i know this thread is about hardware, but its good to point out that without proper software configuration, (i.e., Windows management in regards to services running and what not) you can have the latest and greatest hardware and still have poor gaming performance.
Click to expand...

Still, a badly configured (but clean) windows will outperform a well-configured installation on only marginally slower hardware. There was some benchmarking on the disabling of services over in the OS forums, and the difference after disabling everything it's defendable to disable was practically unmeasurable. (Indeed, the difference between a stock XP pro and an almost-stock 2003 Server install was only a couple of percent.)

Spyware and the like kan take a lot out of a computer, though.
 
HHunt said:
Still, a badly configured (but clean) windows will outperform a well-configured installation on only marginally slower hardware. There was some benchmarking on the disabling of services over in the OS forums, and the difference after disabling everything it's defendable to disable was practically unmeasurable. (Indeed, the difference between a stock XP pro and an almost-stock 2003 Server install was only a couple of percent.)

Spyware and the like kan take a lot out of a computer, though.
Click to expand...

i will have to disagree, i will look for this thread on the other forum section as well, but my XP starts with only 12 services running, and I guarantee I can tell the difference from the stock 26 processes running on startup and gaming performance.
 
Spend the money on the vid card first, then the processor, ram next.

Having a cutting edge piece in any one of those categories won't mean much if the other two blow though. Making a game run smoothly'll need each piece working well enough so the system doesn't get bottlenecked at any one point.
 
Tetrahedron said:
i will have to disagree, i will look for this thread on the other forum section as well, but my XP starts with only 12 services running, and I guarantee I can tell the difference from the stock 26 processes running on startup and gaming performance.
Click to expand...
We welcome the insight the OS subforum... Get ready to prove your claims, "if feels faster" doesn't cut it. :)
 
Phoenix86 said:
We welcome the insight the OS subforum... Get ready to prove your claims, "if feels faster" doesn't cut it. :)
Click to expand...

haha

yeah ok.. the way i look at is, numbers and benchmarks me jack on race day, its actually winning the race that matters. I do not know how I can prove it to you.. maybe you can give me some insight on what you and others consider proper data to prove such a thing. Personally I do not like to have 'extra' things running when they are needed.. like I do not leave the water running on my kitchen sink, because it would be accessible faster when needing water.. it serves no purpose to keep the water running so why have it on?

So why have services enabled that I do not use on startup then eh? Why have services that serve no real purpose on then eh?

PS - I havent found the thread yet, does anyone have a link, please :)
 
Let me link you to some of the previous discussions. If you don't know how to prove the claim, I strongly suggest you do some reading before making the claim.

like I do not leave the water running on my kitchen sink, because it would be accessible faster when needing water.. it serves no purpose to keep the water running so why have it on?
Click to expand...
This is and incorrect analogy because of paging. Unused processes are paged to disk. To make your analogy work better, paging would be like a sensor that sees your not filling anything up, so it stops the water waiting for you to need it later.

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=878887
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=890945
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=892729

As you can see all three of those threads are locked, some of the discussion went south. Do an advanced search, with "services" or "disable services" and my name in the user name field, and the OS subforum selected.

edit: Oh, and we're getting a bit off topic, so I don't want to get into details here. :)
 
There's a sticky. Indeed, it's the top one. :)

As for proving it, I'd suggest something like this:
Decide on a game you play, perferably one that's also easy to benchmark.
Start with services disabled, do three benchmark runs, reboot, repeat.
Enable the services, reboot
Three runs, reboot, repeat.

The results from before and after the reboot should be very close. If not, you've got some error factor.
(Try rebooting and running three more, and see which set is closest.)

Calculate the average results for the six runs with services enables and the six runs with services disabled. Compare the two and see if there's any real difference.

You might also want to compare the results of only the first run after rebooting. Due to the way things are swapped out, the difference might be bigger there.
You can also do things like stopwatching your boot times (or using bootvis to get the time, I guess). Remember that you want to average a few repeats to get reasonable correct times.
 
i think we have now established the most important hardware is the person sitting at the computer :)
 
weebling1 said:
i think we have now established the most important hardware is the person sitting at the computer :)
Click to expand...

lol the man speaks the truth.
it really depends on the game but im at a 50/50 split with cpu/gpu
 
stark said:
Yeah I do plan on upgrading at some point when I have enough spare $$$. My current dying setup is:

ABIT KR7A v1.0
1.60 AMD Athlon XP
NVIDIA GeForce2 MX/MX 400
512mb PC2700

It gets by on min game settings of course, then again it has pretty much been like this since 2002.
Click to expand...

Ouch. Here I am worried about adding a second 7800GTX and more ram. Damn man.
 
so he should start a new thread

"GOT LAME FRAME/SEC, NEED L337 HARDWARE, PLEASE HALP!"
wonder if that would work at the on-ramp by Microsoft campus :D
 
IMO, id say the video card because in a 1 year time period, the increase in speed and features of released video cards is much more dramatic than released CPUs.

IE. a new cpu will last you a lot longer than an equally new video card, so its important to have a capable video card that can handle the current games and future ones.
 
superthrawn said:
The simple logic of this post should have stopped the thread in its tracks.
Click to expand...

Well, the same goes for all other non-redundant parts.
 
NitrouseXpress60 said:
i say chipset is the most important hardware, and your mobo...e.g. lan and such
Click to expand...

As long as your MB and chipset is good enough, I'm inclined to believe that there are other parts that'll hold you back more.
(And an old 10Mbit card should work just fine for online games. It's still five times my download bandwidth.)
 
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