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Whats my bottleneck?

A

afirawker

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 20, 2003
Messages
1,485
A few months ago i upgraded my system (see sig) except for my video card which was a Radeon 7200. Because of the video card I could only run games at medium-low settings at 800*600. Two days ago I received my Radeon 9600XT and thought that I would be able to play flawlessly with high graphic settings. So after installing the Catalyst 3.7 drivers I loaded Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and set the graphics to 1024*768 and put all filters on. After doing that I noticed that gameplay was not smoother, in fact it was just as choppy as when I had the Radeon 7200 (lagg appears during shootouts). So I guess that something is holding my computer back so if you guys could tell me what part of my system needs to be updated.

Thanks in advance:)

EDIT: I have a kickass DSL connection (1.5mb down) so I know its not my connection:)
 
A 9600 xt will not run games smooth with all the settings fully on high high high. Also, if you payed 200 bucks for that card, you could have gotten a evga 5900 from newegg.com, which would have had much more performance, it only costs about 219 dollars. Thats the "budget card" to buy right now. I would suggest turning down the settings on the 9600 pro, it only has 4 pipelines so its not gonna handle massive amounts of detailed graphics very well.
 
You need to get more RAM and better quality at that. I doubt the 9600XT is the bottleneck on your system for most games anyways. I would get 1GB of pc3200 from Mushkin, Kingston, or Corsair. Then i would push that barton to 2.2GHz and see if your performance doesn't get alot better.
 
Shh. A 9600XT is a mainstream card, not budget. Try playing on 10x7, and medium settings. All new games should be smooth at that ^^. Game designers are going nuts these days :)
 
I've been having simular problems actually.
I've got an AMD 2500+, 512MB of DDR400 DC, a 9600XT, A7N8X, and I'm getting fairly bad results. That is compared to other people with close systems.

I think it's my RAM, so that is why I'm upgrading that next. The memory I've got in my system is XtremeDDR, which was a huge mistake, lol.

I still haven't been able to pin point my bottle neck either.
 
Guys, he probably meant $200 Canadian. You cannot get a 5900 for $200 CAD.

Anyways, yeah I think it could be your ram. Don't max out on the detail either. Go 1024x768 medium-high.
 
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