Upgrade from 3200+ (939)

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crnoob

n00b
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Nov 30, 2006
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After doing a bunch of research I'm still a bit stumped.

Currently Oc'ing my 3200 to 2.4 on stock voltage
1 gig (2x512) of kingston ram
evga 7950gt 512

I have a 42 incd 1920x1080 westinghouse and play LOTRO.

I "can" play at ultra high settings but unless im alone in the wilderness the framerate REALLY struggles. I'd like to play on ultra high at all times honestly, the game just looks awesome.

Problem is I'm really short of cash atm and live in Costa Rica...I buy stuff from the US, however shipping + import tax (15% on computer items) adds to my costs.

I'm definetly upgrading to 2 gigs of ram, would prefer not to have to upgrade my video card as I just bought it in december, and I'm just not sure what kinda framerate improvement I'd see with a cpu upgrade.

All things being equal, I'd get an e4300/new mb/2 gigs of DDR2 and OC the crap outta the e4300. However, budget in mind I'm considering either just getting 2 more 512 sticks of ram to bring my total to 2 gigs and possibly getting an X2-3800 and OC'ing that.

(have a nice zalman fan currently on my 3200, just can't seem to make it stable past 2.4 even upping the voltage on my DFI-lanparty board, probably just the generic ram)

How much is my current cpu bottlenecking my peformace? Will I see a noticeable upgrade with an OC'ed X2-3800? It's either this plan or wait and go the intel route. (honestly I'm kinda loathe to buy 1 gig of DDR when 2 gigs of DDR2 is almost the same price but it is what it is.)

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Thanks!
 
Well it looks like your current setup far exceeds the recommended requirements of the game. I would say the first step would be to make sure you have all the latest game patches & current video drivers.

Your cpu may be bottlenecking the video card but I doubt it would bottleneck that game. Also, what o/s are you using? The Nvidia drivers for Vista are not yet polished for that o/s.
 
lodingi said:
Well it looks like your current setup far exceeds the recommended requirements of the game. I would say the first step would be to make sure you have all the latest game patches & current video drivers.

Your cpu may be bottlenecking the video card but I doubt it would bottleneck that game. Also, what o/s are you using? The Nvidia drivers for Vista are not yet polished for that o/s.
Click to expand...

I'm still running XP. Thing is, I'm not trying to run the game at recommended settings, I want to run in 1920x1080 with ALL the bells and whistles at an acceptable framerate. Game runs fine in high settings (though I do get some occasional hitching), but thats not using the ultra-high textures or anything over medium draw distance.
 
another thing is was wondering is if its worth sli'ing this card over buying a 8800gts 640?

all in all I think I'd rather have the power draw from one video card over two but again, don't really want to chuck my current vid card just yet either.
 
any other thoughts on the X2-3800 over my venice 3200? or is it my vid card that has to go?
 
I'd say your RAM is your main bottleneck followed by the processor. Video card is fine.
 
RamonGTP said:
I'd say your RAM is your main bottleneck followed by the processor. Video card is fine.
Click to expand...

question is then, will an X2-3800 oc'ed to 2.5 or above remove the cpu bottleneck?

also, will I still be able to OC the cpu with 4 x512 sticks of DDR? I know the ram will be slowed down because of the 4 sticks as opposed to 2 but I've also heard some OC'ing problems arise from that. Honestly really don't want to buy 2x1024 of regular DDR as its like $40-50 more than DDR2.
 
You can still OC the computer but you have to do it right and there are more things to look out for. I've got 4 sticks on both my main computer which is listed in my sig, as well is a secondary gaming machine and they're both OCed.

-First of all, you need to change your command rate to 2T, you'll need to do this with 4 sticks weather you're going to OC or not. Don't worry about a performance hit, the only thing that actually shows a performance difference is one of the Sandra memory tests, everything else, including real world benchmarks show a 0-3% diference.

-Secondly, do not overclock the memory, use memory dividers to keep the memory at right around DDR 400. I don't embrace the practice of overclocking memory anyway, so when I added two additional sticks to both my rigs, it was simply a matter of changing my CR to 2T and that was it. I maintained the exact same OC on the CPU.

-Third, voltage, sometimes you need to increase the voltage to the ram by .1 when you run 4 sticks, YMMV on this one, but just keep that in mind

As far as the X2 still being a bottlneck, that depends on many factors. The X2 3800+ is basically two 3200+ cores, so if you're running a single threaded game that was bottlenecked by the 3200+, it will still be bottlenecked by the X2 3800+, however your CPU is a DISTANT second to your memory bottleneck IMO, that alone will help quite a bit, especially when you crank up your settings which can and will use up a lot of ram.

Games (as well as anything else) that is multi-threaded will show significant improvements with the X2 3800+ over the 3200+. This system overall will also be much more responsive with the dual core. There have been times when I've had an application like IE or Yahoo Messanger lose it's little mind and peg one of the cores at 100% and I never even knew until I checked my task manager. I've had the same thing happen on a single core system and it became virtually unusable until I forced that application to shut down, and at times even needed to do a hard reboot.

Doubling up on your RAM and going with that X2 3800+ is a very cheap and very worthwhile upgrade for your system. I think you'll be pleased with the results.
 
x2 3800 or Opty 165 and oc it to 2.5 Make sure all driver/control panel optimizations are used.
 
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