Bino, That is cool about our systems.
As for whether a VC will help your system out, I guess it really depends on the game. Some games are GPU bound and others are CPU bound. I don't know which one COD 5 is, but I really can't play it on my current system. My Vista scores are: Processor: 4.3 RAM: 5.1 Graphics: 5.9 Gaming Graphics: 5.7 Primary HD: 5.3 Bobby -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bino Gopal Sent: Sunday, January 11, 2009 5:14 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [H] Thoughts on a new system? Bobby, sounds like you have almost exactly the same system as me (very cool)! Checking some reviews, that card rates almost exactly the same as mine on most tests; very cool... See: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-7800gs-confirms-agp-aint-dead,121 3.html Now my question is, while the CPU is rated lowest in Vista, does that matter for games though? So wouldn't just upgrading the vid card (like I said, you can get a new ATI 4830 for ~$100, which can overclock to 4850/70 speeds [can provide links if you like]) and then you'd have pretty much the latest vid card and it would make the system usable for a while longer? Isn't it worth a shot? It was one of the reasons I got the system with PCIe x16 at the time; so make it extendable in the future... Anyone know if/why this plan wouldn't work btw? Thanks for any help guys! BINO -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bobby Heid Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 2:25 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [H] Thoughts on a new system? Bino, I currently have a p4 3GHz (OC'ed to 3.15GHz) system with an AGP 7800GS video card in it and 2GB RAM. In the performance rating in Vista, my lowest rating is for my CPU. With this setup, Call of Duty - World at War is pretty much unplayable at the installed settings at 800x600. I am able to play COD 4 some other games reasonably on this system. So basically I am in the process now of building a new system. Bobby -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bino Gopal Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2009 3:12 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [H] Thoughts on a new system? Hey guys, I've got this old Dell XPS P4 3.4Ghz system I got in Dec '04 which was a top of the line gaming system back then. What I'm wondering is that I don't do much gaming now (if at all); as I mentioned in my re-intro I spend too much time working nowadays and the GF has taken up all the other free time, but there's still an itch to upgrade in me and try and play an occasional game or two.or try to at least! ;P The system currently is running WinXP MCE SP3, has 2GB of RAM, 2 74GB 10k WD Raptors in RAID0, and the weakest link, the ATI Radeon X800 XT vid card (PCIEx16 though). It has a DVD drive, separate DVD burner, Klipsch 5.1 speakers, Logitech laser mouse, and I have 2 20" Dell FP monitors, so the peripherals are fine! I want to play HL2 part 2 (need to finish part 1 first) and Oblivion at comfortable frame rates; when I tried running Oblivion, it would run ok (~30fps) at some moderate settings, but once I started moving around it had issues and framerates dropped down into the teens, and this was before I loaded the mods for more/better textures and tried to run with everything cranked up! So what I'm wondering is if I can make a budget purchase of a vid card to make this system capable of running these and other games, as I think the P4 3.4 GHz is still a perfectly serviceable chip-I mean, how many games actually use multi-threading to real effect nowadays? I can just add 2GB of RAM (which should be cheap) as I am using 10k RPM HDs in RAID0 to run stuff, so it should be a decently fast system even by current measurements right? Or am I missing something in the equation? Well, assuming upgrading the vid card would help, I got the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4830 with 512MB GDDR3 RAM from Newegg for $100 (fyi $90 after rebate which I never do, and special combo price with a OCZ Diesel 16GB USB flash drive); I figured at that price I could handle eating it-it's only $100! It's PCIEx16, thought my only worry is that is says it's PCIE 2.0 x16, but I think I read those are backward compatible with PCIE 1.0 x16 systems like mine. Anyway, the card is *very* overclockable; some reviews had it ahead of even the stock 4870 in tests, so I figure it was the best bang for the buck, and that if a $100 investment could make my old system ($3000 at the time for everything) last another year, it'd be worth it. The plan would be to go with a completely new i7 system once all that stuff is cheaper, so new CPU, MB, case then, and probably get a better vid card and HDs too. Thoughts on any of this? One worry is that I've read that Oblivion might be CPU-limited; couldn't figure out if that would happen to me or not. Only other worry is if the card would work; guess I'll find that out soon enough. So did I reason this all out correctly or would someone like to point out the flaw in my logic? :P BINO
