Looking for some advice on upgrading my PC to play some new games, could use some advice.
Since I'm not going to be doing any REAL racing this year (or for the next 2-3 years), I'll have to settle for racing of the online variety (I'm way too competitive to not do ANY kind of racing at all.)
Since there really aren't any good cycle games (aside from MotoGP2), I'll mostly be playing driving games. GT4 on the PS2 is great and all, but it's not the most realistic game out there and the AI sucks.
Mainly - I want to be able to play Live for Speed, rFactor, and GTR at full detail with a good frame rate (~40+fps), good resolution, and a good amount of cars on the track.
Right now, my 800MHz P3 box with 768mb ram and GF3 Ti200 card can't play these games at more than 8-9fps with NO cars on the track at 800x600 with all the detail shut off. My 1.5GHz laptop is better, running at ~40fps if I've got it on 800x600, low detail, with 8-10 AI cars running around.
I've had 2-3 people suggest to me that all I need on my 800MHz P3 is a new video card. If somebody else here agrees with that, then I'll try it... but I'm having a hard time accepting the idea that a $200 video card in my 4-year-old PC will make the difference between 8fps at no detail, and 40fps at full.
I'm willing to swap out the motherboard, processor, ram, and video card... hopefully for not too much $. Got any suggestions?
I'd build a new box if i were you. Research what kind of configuration will work best for your games. The more RAM the better, and watch the front side bus on the processor. Get a decent video card, but you don't need a $600 card. Probably $200-250 should do it. Good Luck.
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. Under $200 anywhere. Performs great on NR2003, GPL, F1C etc. for me. But a good processor and lots of RAM are just as important.
Upgrade! You may spend around $6-$700 for a homebuilt computer. I suggest that because you don't have to deal with customer support from India. :-[ Goto www.pricewatch.com for your computer needs. I personally am a gaming geek BIG TIME!!! I play almost every night for about 3 hours. What I have is an AMD2800, MSI Motherboard, 1 gig DDR 2100 RAM, ATI 9700 PRO, Sound Blaster Audigy 2, 200 GB HD and I spent around $600 including the case and 400 WATT power supply. I kept the floppy, CD Burner and CD-Rom from my old computer. Think about it. $600. You will spend that in a weekend racing. Not to shabby! :P
AMD baby...all the way!
Or...you could just spend a gazillion dollars for an Alienware system. Nah...building your own box is really a lot of fun.
Based on what I've read today (I'm such a slacker sometimes..) it seems the AMD chipset is the way to go. I'm planning to reuse my old case (generic ATX tower), power supply (it's only a month old, Antec 350W), HD (7200rpm 250mb), and DVD burner. So I'm really only going to upgrade the mobo, proc, ram, and video card. Hopefully just upgrading those parts will keep me WELL under the $600 you spent.
A few folks now from another board I'm on have sworn a new video card will make a noticeable improvement (I currently have a GeForce3 Ti200 with 64mb). So I figure I'll try that first and see what happens. Worst case I carry the card over to my new system.
$600 one race weekend? I haven't had a weekend that cheap in a good 2 years. I miss the old days when I was slow enough to make a set of tires last 2 weekends :(
Though I'm certainly not a guru on the subject I too was in a similar situation last year. I was playing some games like Mech Warrior 4 Mercenaries and the video would lock up on me during scenes with moderate amounts of A/I being generated (numerous active characters battling on screen at once).
My system isn't anything crazy, it's an AMD 2600 (1200mhz) with 512 RAM, 60GB 5k rpm HD, and an ATI Radeon 9800 PRO video card. I originally only had 256 RAM with my old video card and was told that it would help alot to double it, it did help, but only a little. I then thought it had to be the video card so I jumped up to the 9800 PRO and that made a big difference. It still will occasionally lock up during heavy A/I scenes but in general it runs much more flawlessly.
Since then I have considered a faster hard drive and doubling the RAM again, but I was advised against this individually by several computer techs at different places. They seemed to agree that the major problem is most likely my 'front side bus speed' which is slow by comparison to what is out there now. That would require a M/B change and I am on the fence if I should jump up to the AMD 64 bit processor (since 64 bit is what most new systems will be based on very soon). The upper 32 bit systems with a faster front side bus will run the current stuff, but I have read that some of the games out on the ever approaching horizon will be even more demanding than the 32 bit based systems are capable of. The 32 bit systems are pretty much maxed out now and won't see any real improvement in speed from where the best ones are at now. Also to consider is that as the 64 bit systems gain main stream popularity the options for what you can get for the 32 bit systems will decrease. This is all based on what I have read in magazines and from what several tech's have told me. :)
Exactly Mike, that's what I had in my post. FSB on the processor is key in getting games to run smoothly. A video card can only do so much. When programs are graphics intensive, the entire package works as a team. This isn't a big deal when running office programs, but gaming takes a toll on the system. It's also good to make sure you put adequate cooling in the box as well. Fans are cheap insurance.
This aint a racing game but I just saw some clips from Battlefield 2 coming out in June I think...It looke really sweet. Like battlefied 1942 but Modern day warfare.
Jim, think of the video card as a separate computer, it has its own processor and memory. More memory is good if the program takes use of it. Basicaly if you think of it as caching frames in memory on the card, so when it swaps frames and other graphic algorithms the data is there on the card, it doesn't have to go through the main bus and request/transfer, swap out, etc. So a good video card can make a big difference. Now if your main board, it still slow, CPU, bus speed, memory speed, the data is bottlenecked there.
If you build your own, buy a good card and give that a try--as long as you have the latest and greatest bus type. If that doesn't do it for you, you can move the card to a new main board.
My $.02
OK. There seems to be a general consensus that a video card might make a pretty good difference, so I picked up a nVidia 6600GT card on lunch today. I would've gone ATI but from what I've read, the 6600 is the better way to go in the $200 bracket (the ATI X800 is better but it's $100 more.) I'll give it a whirl when I get home.
Things sure have come a long way since the day of CGA, EGA and VGA ;) The last time I really knew what was "hot" in computer graphics was when I got a new 486 with a "hi-color" graphics card (which was shortly outdated by the "true-color" cards...)
Yeah, and while 64bit processors are here, just wait until 64bit programs and OSs hit the market with regularity. I'm sure we'll all a little upgrading to do. Good luck!
The video card will indeed help you, but not nearly as much as a new CPU and motherboard.
Go to PCclub.com and grab one of thier upgrade kits. Id suggest the AMD Athlon 64 with MSI board for $200. Get two of thier Kingston Valueram 512 mg DDR 3200 RAM sticks for $60 each.
The $320 bucks and the new vid card you bought will give you a system that will run anything as smooth as a movie.
That is basically the system I am running for online games such as Everquest and World of Warcraft. Its capable of fantastic frame rates even with 100 other players in the area and the graphics maxed.
I also just remembered, make sure you have an adequate power supply to run your system with that new video card added! I had to upgrade my power supply when I added the 9800 PRO card because combined with my basic system it required as a minimum what my then power supply was capable of as a maximum. I upgraded to a '450 Watt Antec Silent Purepower' power supply so I had not only enough power to run the basic system and video card but also both the DVD player and CD burner as well as anything else I may choose to add. If I remember correctly the tech suggested a bare minimum of 350 watts to run my system, but he wanted me to use at least 400 watts. I would definately check the video card box and see what it suggests as bare minimums and preffered wattages. :)
Well, I hooked up the video card and WOW what a difference. I'm pretty shocked. I ran the 3Dmark03 software and it performed about 8x faster. The graphics stuff is WAY faster... now it's the CPU holding it back.
I could really just about live with it the way it is. I've still gotta have a bunch of detail turned down, but it's much better. The new card has HDTV outputs on it. That means I could play my games on my HDTV downstairs. But the PC won't be happy running it at 720p resolutions. I think I might upgrade anyways... from here it's only another $300 at Fry's....
3 Words: Front side bus
Get something decent...have fun!
Tell you what man, it'll be worht it when you upgrade to a smarter MB and CPU and power supply. Don't forget to get the memory for it. There half a race weekend. :)
QuoteTell you what man, it'll be worht it when you upgrade to a smarter MB and CPU and power supply. Don't forget to get the memory for it. There half a race weekend. :)
Yeah. Sometimes, seriously, I wish I was more like those armchair quarterback losers whose sole hobby is to spend a weekend parked in front of a TV watching football, drinking cans of Busch Lite. I have some family members like that. It's sad sometimes that I'm envious of them... I'd have SO much more money in my pocket at the end of the day.
But no, I have to be into all the expensive hobbies. Motorcycle racing, car upgrades, home theater, computers and computer games. It's really rough being me sometimes.
;)
Just got back from Fry's (uh-oh.) New Asus K8N motherboard, AMD 64 3000+ chip, 1GB Kingston DDR400 ram. I'm going to be up all night. I gotta find that link I found yesterday for a free download of Windows XP 64-bit beta.
QuoteJust got back from Fry's (uh-oh.) New Asus K8N motherboard, AMD 64 3000+ chip, 1GB Kingston DDR400 ram. I'm going to be up all night. I gotta find that link I found yesterday for a free download of Windows XP 64-bit beta.
I see you went all the way, probably be alot better off in the long run. Actually it probably seems like a rather insignificant amount of money when compared to racing, figuring you'll be able to use this for quite a while.
*sigh*
And I encounter my first problem.
Got everything installed and hooked up. Surprisingly simple. Boot it up, go into the BIOS, make sure everything is there. All the devices, etc show up. Looks good. Go to boot into Windows... and the PC reboots itself. It comes back up with the XP prompt to try safe mode. So I try safe mode. It reads from the HD for about 1-1.5 seconds and... reboot.
So I dropped in my XP CD and figured I'd try a fresh install. Boots into the XP setup utility fine. As soon as I tell it to install XP and it reads from the HD - reboot.
I was so hoping I wouldn't have to deal with this. I just want it to work. It's like it's not happy reading the HD or something. I'm going to bed now, but, any ideas?
2 words, 1 letter; X Box Halo
Sorry, I'm just a smartass. I have not yet found computer gaming comparable to the 27" screen and XBox, but it's cool to watch you guys figure this out. Good Luck with the install.
Yeah I have an idea. Check your bios settings and make sure you don't have your HD booting first. Did you say you got a new hard drive? Did you set the pins right? Something doesn't sound right, let me know. ???
Well I tried a few things.
1) Removed all other drives (CD-ROM and floppy). No difference.
2) Moved HD around on the IDE channels. No difference.
3) Tried a different HD. No difference.
4) Tried an old, less-power-hungry video card. No difference.
So it's not the HD, as a different HD did the same thing. The HD is set to "cable select" on the jumper settings, and when I move it from primary to secondary, master to slave, the BIOS reports it correctly. If the HD is the only device connected, it's gotta be the only item in the boot order, so I don't think that's it.
I also tried swapping the video card out, thinking that perhaps I was maxing the power supply and as soon as some load was put on the system (HD reading) it would reboot. But going to an old video card (one without a giant fan on it, etc) did not change the results.
Oh yeah, and an update... I think it did this last night too and I forgot. I tried the XP CD again (but with a different HD installed) and when it got to the part where it tries reading from the HD, I got a BSOD.
Here's a screenshot (I took it with my camera...) Anybody know what it means?
(https://www.ccsforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.kingpinracing.com%2FPics%2Fscreen.JPG&hash=f1c206c83cbbf7d5679fe38adb3484c1144b2142)
What where you trying to do before all this?
I had a virus that got deep into my computers system a few years ago and I had to deal with the BIOS at that time. There is a small battery on the mother board that is for the BIOS memory and clock. I was told to remove this battery to reset the BIOS back to a default configuration and leave it out for 20 minutes or so. From what I was told I needed to reset the BIOS to remove the problem it had in it's configuration. I then had to make sure the boot order was correct on the BIOS configuration to have it boot off of the DVD drive. Turns out that the CD player/burner that came on the computer when I bought it has some compatibility problems with my system, and even though it works, it couldn't be used to boot off of or play games with.
I have no idea if this will help you or not but mabey you also have some type of compatibility problem with the combination of equipment you now have. The other possible issue could be with an inadequate power supply, the tech that suggested the larger one for my computer said that low power can do some weird stuff. :-/
I *think* I may be on to something.
I did some digging, and came across the "Ultimate Boot CD" - http://www.ultimatebootcd.com Basically, you download an .iso and burn it to a CD (thank GOD my laptop has a burner in it) and it's a bootable disc with DOS, Linux, some utilities, etc. Kinda neat.
So I burned a copy, booted from it, and chose to boot into DOS. The disc sets up a virtual ram drive, and then loads the OS there so I can remove the CD-ROM. So it creates the vdisk fine, but when it starts copying the files over, it fails out with a CRC error.
I think I have a bad RAM chip. I'm gonna run to Best Buy while I'm out today and pick up another chip.
There have been reports of problems with dual RAM. Since I don't have that configuration, I can't help you out. Anyone else have an idea?
Make sure your bios selector pins are set correctly as well as this will screw things up.
I'm 99.9% sure I've got it.
The doofus at Fry's sold me a 1gb stick of ram. Apparently that won't work.
On my way out to drop off one of my rear home-theater speakers to get fixed this afternoon, I stopped off at CDW to pick up a replacement piece of ram. Talking to the sales dude there - he tells me that I need TWO sticks that match... not one. If I want 1gb of ram, I need to run with 2 512's... not 1 1024.
It was at that point that I remembered something similar with an old Pentium-II box I had years ago. So I bought the 2 512's from CDW. Just got home now. Yanked the 1gb chip, installed the new pair, and so far, it's at least successfully managed to boot up in DOS mode (wouldn't even do that before.) So I'm gonna update my BIOS with the latest flash from ASUS and try Windows again. But I think I'm good.
Had I not stopped at CDW... I probably *never* would've figured this out. I thought the need for pairs of memory sticks went away with the Pentium-II's (as my Pentium-III had no such requirement.)
I do appreciate all you folks trying to help out here. :)
Quote2 words, 1 letter; X Box Halo
Sorry, I'm just a smartass. I have not yet found computer gaming comparable to the 27" screen and XBox, but it's cool to watch you guys figure this out. Good Luck with the install.
Oh yeah... and just to reply - dude, I know what you mean. I quit playing PC games a long time ago, and have been a PS2/XBOX fan since. No BS, none of this "configuration" crapola... just drop the game in and go. BUT... I'm into racing games. Aside from MotoGP-2 for XBOX, nothing really does it for me. GT4 is fun for solo-runs, but if I want to RACE, it sucks. Gotta have a PC to play the 3 sim racers that are out now.
FYI... I'll have my newly-updated for-games PC hooked up to my 34" Sony XBR widescreen HDTV :)
Congratulations! :D :D :D :D
There was no way I was gonna let this thing beat me....
;D
Without trying to get too geeky on you, the memory pairing done now is completely different from the old days of pairing memory. In the old days you had a 32-bit processor and only 16 bit ram, or before that a 16 bit processor and 8 bit ram, or even a 32 bit CPU and 8 bit ram. So for it to read the RAM properly you need the appropriate number of matching sticks of RAM to equal bits it could address simultaneously. In the case of a 16 bit CPU and 8 bit RAM it meant pairs of memory. In the case of a 32 bit CPU and 8 bit ram, memory had to go in groups of 4.
Today's systems will work either way, paired or not paired, BUT you will get a major difference in speed. When Intel and AMD went to 800Mhz and above Front side bus (FSB), what they actually did was take 2 sticks of 400Mhz RAM and address them simultaneously. This gives the effectiveness of a single stick at 800Mhz. That is why your memory is rated as PC3200 (400Mhz), yet the bus is 800Mhz. If you ran a single stick of 1Gb RAM as you mentioned you had originally purchased, your 800Mhz FSB Processor would only be running at 400Mhz and as everyone said earlier, that is #1 in building a fast gaming system.
So you probably had a bad stick of RAM, but you did receive good advice in buying the memory in pairs.
I might be slow on a bike, but I can fix a computer.
QuoteOh yeah... and just to reply - dude, I know what you mean. I quit playing PC games a long time ago, and have been a PS2/XBOX fan since. No BS, none of this "configuration" crapola... just drop the game in and go. BUT... I'm into racing games. Aside from MotoGP-2 for XBOX, nothing really does it for me. GT4 is fun for solo-runs, but if I want to RACE, it sucks. Gotta have a PC to play the 3 sim racers that are out now.
FYI... I'll have my newly-updated for-games PC hooked up to my 34" Sony XBR widescreen HDTV :)
Glad to hear you got it working Jim...
Is that 34" a CRT? If so, you suck!!! ;) BTW, if it is, how do you like it?
That's the TV I want!
Scott I LOVE it. I traded in my 46" Mitsu projection TV for it. Even though it's a little smaller, if picture quality is what you're after, then a traditional tube TV is the way to go. The picture is phenomenal... DVD's look like a HD signal.
I went for Sony's "XBR" model, but only cuz I got a smokin' deal on it. If I were paying retail, then I'd go for the "XS" model - 1 step below the XBR. The only difference is the cable card slot and pic-in-pic.
http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_BrowseCatalog-Start?CategoryName=xbr_tube&Dept=tvvideo