OT: d-i-y PC hardware upgrade direction .. ?

[T i m]

Hi All,

I have asked the following on a PC Hardware n/g but know many of you guys also build yer own PC's when you aren't fitting condensing or firing nails so ..

My current PC is an Asrock K7VT4A+ MOBO, Sempron 2600+ (1.8GHz), 1G DDR, 80+200G ATA with a Sapphire Radeon 9600 (256) AGP Graphics card. This box has been rock solid since I upgraded to that spec some time ago (this full height tower has seen probably 5 MOBO's over the years ) ;-)

Whilst it's no rocket ship it's ok for most of the stuff I use it for .. or have been using it for till now.

I'm not really a 'games player' (no X-Box or PS2 etc) but have enjoyed most of the FPS (First Person Shootemups) over the years like Doom, UT, Quake and more recently Pariah and now FEAR Combat.

And it's the last one that shows how slow my PC is getting (or more accurately how 'unready' it is for the coming generation of games)?

So, dilemma, do I just upgrade the AGP card or move over to PCIe (with a new MOBO / CPU / |RAM etc)?

With the latter I could then have dual graphics cards (SLI?), Dual Chan Mem, and SATA etc etc.

The remains of my old box would be re-cased and probably find a happy home in the family somewhere ;-)

The replacement spec could be ..(any these aren't particularly 'selected' solutions, just what is in stock with a friendly local supplier)

Asrock AM2XLI-eSATA2 mOBO Athlon 64 3800+ (2.4GHz)

2 x 512 DDR2 Probably ATA + SATA and the big question mark .. NVIDIA GeForce 7900GT ?

All the best ..

T i m

p.s. If you got the time / bandwidth and want to see how your box fairs with a new game like FEAR Combat it can be downloaded (and played) free from ..

sure you are older than 17 .. )

[dennis]

AMD is currently outclassed in performance and price by Intel Core2 CPUs. The E6300 Core 2 Duo 1.86G is frequently overclocked to 2.5G+ and is only £122 from ebuyer.

[John Rumm]

If you want top flight performance on games, you may find that a dual core processor is not an advantage since many games have an internal single threaded architechture. This can result in them being able to extract no more than half the available processor performance. Hence a "big" single core CPU may be better. The Athlon FX series are still generally the games players CPUs of choice - although they are quite pricy.

I have also noted another problem with some games on my AMD x2 4200 system which can result in poor performance due I believe to timer related issus. These however can be fixed either at run time in task manager by setting the processor affinity to only allow the game to run on one of your logical CPUs, or by tweaking the .exe headers with the old WindowsNT4 resource kit utility ImageCFG.exe which will let you set the affinity flags in an exe files header.

[T i m]

Ok, I guess this might change in the (near?) future?

Ok ..

Ouch .. 200 notes for a chip .. ;-(

;-( Sounds like I'd better keep this PC for PC things and buy an X-Box?

Hmm, that all sounds a bit too involved for my simple desires John?

Just out of interest I was just testing FEAR Combat on this box and FRAPS was showing ~70 fps? However I did see it fall quite low a few times (~20) but it also 'felt' 'laggy at times (nothing else using my LAN at the time etc)?

I spotted somewhere that with the dual core CPU's at least you could play the game on one core whilst the other one looked after the broadband / av etc? ;-)

All the best ..

T i m

[Sylvain VAN DER WALDE]

Was it uk.comp.homebuilt? They're a good group, and very helpful.

I'd go for the AGP card for now. Upgrade later. There is a useful message on uk.comp.homebuilt about a Nvidia 6600GT (256 mb Ram) card, which can easily be overclocked. Don't forget about having an adequate power supply, as the "better" graphics cards use a lot of current.

I'd have an Asus board, myself. Asus probably has a greater choice. Choosing the right motherboard is very important matter. Asrock is Asus's cheaper line of motherboards, hence inferior (fewer useful extras).

I'd go for more Ram. Probably 2 GB.

Don't forget your power supply. A cheap one may cause problems. You probably won't want less than 450 Watts.

Don't ask me to expand on my answers. They're only meant to point you in the right direction. P.S.Another good group, if you choose an Asus motherboard is: comp.periphs.mainboard.asus. Look out for Paul. He's knowledgeable and trustworthy.

Sylvain.

[dennis]

I think you will be surprised by how fast a Core 2 CPU is. Even at the 1.86G speed it will be as fast as an 3000+ FX.

That shouldn't be a problem on Core 2 as both CPUs share the same cache. I haven't tried it though.

[John Rumm]

Yup, they are certainly the best that Intel have knocked out for a while. The top end 6800 "Extreme" is certainly as good as the FX60, although I would object to paying £700 for a processor! (the FX60 is still a tad pricey at £500). The more realistically priced stuff is a harder call though.

A colleague of mine just built a core duo machine, so I will report back when I have had a chance to play with it!

Would not of thought it was down to cache - since one of the cores is to all intents idle on the game (splinter cell pandora tomorrow). If it was chache, then having cores sharing it could actually make it worse since background activity on one core could expunge data from the cache still required by the other.

[John Rumm]

Yup, indeed it already is. Newer stuff ought to work fine. (it is probably more of a problem, if like me, you can only bring yourself to buy a game once it has made it into the £5.99 budget collections! ;-))

You were looking at the cheap ones then ;-)

You never seem to get the same range of game types available on the consoles...

To be fair it is easy enough to put together a reasonable spec PC that will play most stuff quite well. If you can avoid insisting on running every game at 1600x1200 resolution anyway!

I shall try it on one of my computers a report back.

If you work like I do, and tend to run lots of applications and do stuff in the background like transcode/burn DVDs etc. then it is well worth having a dual core chip since it does make even windows multitask quite smoothly! ;-)

[dennis]

From your description it is caused by the process flipping between cores. On AMD these have separate caches so if it does move to the other core it will have no data in the cache and takes time to refill. If it does this a lot it will slow down by quite a bit.

On Intel Core2 the cache is shared so even if it does flip between the cores it shouldn't make as much difference.

[T i m]

Well, I rarely buy them at release date that's for sure, but possibly a bit before 'bargain bin' ;-

I couldn't bare to scroll any further John ;-(

True ..

Well exactly, but with all the hardware variables mixed with available funds and what the local supplier stocks (or can get it) can end up a nightmare trying to avoid the 'who sold you that then' syndrome? ;-(

I generally run 800x600 x 16 and most of the fancy display options turned off because good 'game play' is more important to me than pretty graphics. It would be nice to have them as well of course but not 'instead of' (my eyes have trouble keeping up with it all as it is!) ;-(

Cheers John .. I tried it again later and I think FRAPS may have been getting confused first time .. it was dropping to ~20 fps when the action got busy ;-)

Well I do do some of that (rendering videos etc) but generally only browse the web / ng's at the same time (all be it a bit slower) ;-(

So, I think I may have a slightly better thought re some actual kit now (before I go off the idea completely).

Asrock AM2xLI-eSATA mobo (cos that's what they have in stock)

AMD Athalon 64 3800+ (2.4GHz) (or best price variant)

2 x 1G DDR2 (because)

nVidia 7600GS (as the 6600GT seems more difficult to get now)

Probably not going to set anything on fire but might be a general improvement over the 2600+ Semp, Radeon 9600 ?

All the best ..

T i m

[John Rumm]

I usually run my desktop at 1600x1200 32bit colour, but drop to 1024x768 for most games - it does seem to run higher resolutions at pretty much the same speed, but to be honest it does not seem to add anything much to the game play or even the graphics quality at the higher resolutions

- at least in the games I have played to date.

Have you looked at any of the x2 chips? For the sort of thing you are doing they may prove better suited. I found the other day I was able to burn two DVDs at about 22MB/sec throughput (each) concurrently with no apparent slowdown in user response on normal apps and without the burn proof technology in the writers needing to kick in once! (although I expect I may have had more difficulty sourcing the data fast enough had the image data not been coming of my RAID stripe set)

Pay very careful attention to MB / Proc / RAM combinations that have been verified as working by the Mobo maker. Loads of combinations that "ought to work in theory" can either prove unreliable, or have gottchas. For example with my "entertainment" system it was very difficult at the time finding DIMMs over 512MB that would run interleaved to get the best performance. There was no combination of available parts that would do it with more than one gig of ram either.

Processor wise you would see a big improvement. I have not read through the specs of all the graphics cards to give you any sensible answer with respect to that bit. I stuck a "mid range" card in my system - a ATI X800GT card. So far it has coped well with anything I have tried appart from one game demo that is included in the 3D Mark benchmark suite that completly floors it! (5 fps), I have no idea how much you would have to spend to get decent performance on that!

[John Rumm]

Not exactly. The process seemed to stay glued to one core - even without setting the affinity. From the few comments I have managed to find on the cause the most plausable suggestion seemed to be a timer related issue - but I can't confirm one way or the other yet.

That would depend on the pattern of memory access and the other non related processes running at the same time I would have though. I can see it working both for and against you in different circumstances.

[dennis]

That would be true. When I was designing systems I found that some of the applications ran faster with the cache turned off on the early Motorola RISC systems. I had endless arguments with some of the other engineers about how I had cooked the test. Shame they didn't believe me and had to redesign their stuff later. ;-)

[seani]

It all depends on how much value you put on your time.

Personally, I would first try a simple upgrade to a decent graphics card. If that doesn't do the trick for you, buy a ready-made system but with cheap/onboard graphics. That way someone who's set up to do it expends time and effort ensuring that everything will play nicely together, leaving you to pop in the upgraded graphics card yourself.

The only thing you have to ensure is that there's a bit of headroom in whatever PSU they use - modern cards can be thirsty in this respect.

[T i m]

Not much because 'PC's' (building / networking etc) have been a part of my life for the last 25 years .. not only as a living but a hobby. ;-)

That was my first though .. and after going round the 'new system

*and* card' loop think that might be the *easiest* (if not futurproof / vfm) solution. ;-(

It takes me about 40 mins to (carefully) assemble a PC these days .. and a good few hours to install / SP the OS, AV / etc etc .. Assuming I have a known kit of parts (and re your point).

Agreed. I can't say I have really had any issues with this current (and home built as are all the PC I go near) setup. It's pretty bomb proof and plays all but the most 'demanding games (that I am interested in anyway).

It's just the group of lads I online with might be going to FEAR (from Pariah) and I'm gonna get left (further) behind (most of them have no lives but some serious gaming PC's) ;-)

All the best ...

T i m