For those of you who don’t know me very well (i.e.: all but madcunt & Saux & Armourlite if he's around here somewhere...) I'm 26 now and a bit of a OC'holic. I also happen to be a Father
, Husband, and freaking broke as hell... So since I love to design high end machines, and cannot obtain a new shinny 920 + 6 GBs (or 12) of DDR3 2100+ ram... nm the rest of it... I decided I had to overhaul my trusty old socket 939 rig, oh and my system is a
AGP graphics port system.
Back story / old hardware list This baby had the absolute latest hot off the forge processor I could afford, the (150$) 3700+ XP single core processor. It's also has 2 GB's of Corsair XMS ram, count it, a Whopping 2048 MEGABYTES of ram! Yes folks, this puppy can put a spit shine on any video game you throw at her (just don’t put the resolution past 800*600, or you can enable pixel doubling!!! ok, so I exaggerate... honestly... but only in Crysis would I enable pixel doubling...), and to top it off... Let me introduce you to the 7800 GS Video card =-P! Watch the slobber! ...freaking noobs...
Ok, so the 3dmarks 2006 score was at 3,600+ when all test were run (yes, it's the FULLY enabled 3dmarks 2006... not the "I don’t have a CD key" version... *cough*). That’s w/ the GPU at 20% OC at 500 instead of stock 400, the GPU memory was also juiced, can’t remember % (I want say 25%), the CPU was stock at 2.2 GHz, was running at 2.75 on average, 2.783 on cold days, if below 60 degrees Fahrenheit (15.5^9 Celsius for you Southern Hemisphere blokes) I could crank that puppy up to 2.838 GHz. Now to do all that, the ram was also having to be scaled BACK from 400 MHz to 333mhz at times (depending on what speed the CPU was running).
So ya, I have been pushing upgrades off of my plate the last... four years?
Damn. I didn’t really think about it till I just said it. Honestly, it has not had issues playing games. I have scaled the system from a GeForce 2 (at the start), a GeForce 4, a 9800 Pro, and the 7800 GS. It seriously had no issues playing games until it had Crysis feed to its ass (and I KINDA resolved that... let’s just say I tweaked the ever living crap out of Crysis...) (Were honestly talking 100+ hours of just "alright mad/Armourlite/Saux go cloak... go uncloak... yep, I can tell a difference, thanks guys!" time). So needless to say, that processor had hit the "wall" of performance capabilities and the same could be said for the graphics card.
Alright, but I can still KINDA play... and now I'm to suffer through that and what I want and Crysis 2? Fuck That. Correction, I said,
Fuck That Shit. In no way on God’s Green earth (much less in 3d rendered rain and lightning and bastards going cloak So I flat out CANNOT see their ass (can, but not really, honestly....) am I going to SUFFER through that crap again. My ass is not going to be the one saying in TS or Vent "Sorry guys, Its my video card I swear! I cannot see cloak..." when I get the teams ass whacked because I cannot play proper support / assault. So below you see will see the easy way to upgrade your old ass rigs for your kids / friends / cheap ass bastards like me who happen to be broke while putting their wife through college for the bigger $$$ and the nicer rigs later in life...
Prioritize your Component Upgrade List...Here’s how the honest to god GPU / CPU impact your video games...
1) FPS = Sum of ALL your parts working together. You have to understand that your FPS is really determined 1st by the video card and then the CPU. If you get 100 fps while playing at 640 * 480, then try to upscale to the next monitor resolution. If you again get 100 fps while at 800 * 600, then go to the next, if you again get 100 fps while at 1024*768, repeat going to the next size up... Reason for this is that your 100FPS limit is NOT the GPU. Its the CPU. The GPU is held back by the CPU. rinse and repeat till you finally see the fps drops ANY.
2) All Hardware is Out of date within 24 months. Period. (yes, that especially applies to the 1000+ processors out there) **anyone seen a FX-60 Socket 939 processor?!** j/k'ing, the new processor is Bad Fucking Ass... Your buying the capabilities it gives you over the cheaper processors. That’s all. *unlocked multiplier, so you can squeeze an extra inking of a % out of it*.
3 Replace the GPU w/ the most bad ass GPU you can afford. The CPU will probably not be the bottleneck.
The Shiny 'New to Me' ComponentProcessorReplaced the 3700+ Single core XP w/ a 4200 x2 XP, also manufactured in 2001 baby! I should have gone w/ the dual back then... except that the 3700+ cost me like 150$ and the dual WOULD have cost my ass like 500$+.
Ultimate result = 3DMark06 CPU score went from 1060 to 2030 points baby!!! That’s a 90% increase in CPU score for 75.76 US $ = Alright, that’s a hell of a deal
. Also, I did notice that my frame rate in Crysis about DOUBLED. Hm, could that have something to do w/ the new processor since that was the only thing I had changed out at the time of testing?
a quick skirmish of 7-2 with a serious beat down to the other side in team deathmatch said yes, that I could play crysis on the old 7800 GS at a shitty screen size... but why would I want to?
New Kick Ass Video CardReplaced the Good old Trustworthy 7800 GS that I paid 300 USD$ for w/ a 4670 that was had for 100$ after a 25$ mail in rebate
. Benchmark score went from 3600 to like 7700 total (and the fan = has not been over volted... yet...). I hope to hit around the 8000 score (which I have no doubt I will, depends on the cooling later on). T000000000o get a rough estimate of the video card only increase of performance in 3dmark, we had a old benchmark total of 3600. Take out the CPU 1000 score that leaves 2600 due to the old graphics card, not shabby. On the new score though, there was a total of 7700 so take out 2000 on the new score due to the CPU, leaving 5640 left over from the graphics card. That gives a rough increase of 216%. Again, that’s rough. Now, the main areas that I hardly noticed it walked over the old setup is in the basic SM2.0 areas, it had a performance increase of about 180-200% on average. No biggie, expected that since we’re talking a difference of 300fps being boosted to about 450-500 fps. But in the areas of SM 3.0, were talking around a 400% increase in %. There was a screen where four quadrants are being displayed w/ a iguana being rotated 360 degrees around, and I was averaging like 16 fps on the old card for that entire thing. The new video card gets capped at 64fps CONSTANTLY. Hello. That was on the new CPU as well. Fuck. Looks like someone ultimately is back in the market again for a FX-60... Anyone seen one lying around
?
Side Note:
Processor, was part of the "Christmas day package" and wife had me remove it to place it under the tree... damn... would ya look at that... a AM2 socket 4200x2 is in place of the legit 939 4200x2 under the tree... but you'd only know that by seeing the year was marked 2005 instead of 2001... lol
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Video card was from my mom, she also was talked into getting me something electronic this year
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Looking to score another 2GBs of Corsair XMS C2 memory to inject in the machine and come up w/ 4 GB's of ram... any one got any contacts
? Also will accept Kingston's HyperX or some fiery PC4000 from mushkin... saw some of their DDR 500 stick stuff... figured that can drop in w/ the XMS just as well lol
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