Looking for a cheap upgrade...
 

Right. I'm thinking of giving this baby a small performance boost, as she doesn't quite live up to my expectations (or needs, anyway).
Specs:
Pentium 4 540 3.2GHz OC to 3.5GHz
AsRock 4CoreDual-VSTA motherboard
Asus nVidia EN7900GT 256mb
2 x 1GB DDRII ram
2 x 160gb 5400rpm harddrives

I got XP home ed. installed on one harddrive and Vista Ultimate on the other one, using XP for gaming only. I haven't tried running all my games on Vista, just CS:S which was kinda laggy on a server with 30 latency and all maxed settings - and TF2, which for some odd reason runs pretty well at all maxed. On Xp, I run Crysis at about medium settings, Battlefield 2/2142 at all high except AA which is just 2x, CS:S and TF2 all highest and FSX at about medium settings too...
So, is it just me, or should it be able to perform a little better? I think my CPU might be bottlenecking, but I really don't know enough about this stuff, so... Does anyone know how I can boost her up for a minor expense, as I'm about to buy a rather expensive laptop soon, and I don't have that much money?

Clink! :beer:

Re: Looking for a cheap upgrade...
 

The best upgrade is to a dualcore CPU, check if your mobo support C2D and get one if yes

Re: Looking for a cheap upgrade...
 

I would bung a better gfx card in it and then a faster cpu later on.

Re: Looking for a cheap upgrade...
 

Why because his 7900GT is ok while the singlecore CPU is awful and it will bottleneck a better video card like hell

Re: Looking for a cheap upgrade...
 

So, right now there's no excessive bottleneck in my setup?

I'm going to get a hell of a gaming rig sometime when I can afford it, but right now I just want to upgrade this one, so it's very unlikely that I'm going to throw in stuff more than this one time. :)

Oh, and I forgot: It'd be great if you could recommend some specific parts. I may be wrong, but I can imagine it'd be very stupid to go out and get a 1.8 GHz C2D, when this is running at 3.5Ghz? I don't see how that should run anything better - but then again, I may be wrong. You don't have to waste your time getting links, I'm from Denmark, and all those sites such as Newegg and BestBuy don't ship to Europe... Which I think is stupid!

Re: Looking for a cheap upgrade...
 

People may all whine about P4 but the one he has is still fine. Most apps dont even use two cores yet if were all honest. While its very nice to have a newer faster processor i still think he'd notice more of an improvement with a newer gfx card. CS/S AND BF2 are hardly CPU intensive.

Re: Looking for a cheap upgrade...
 

CS:S runs fine, I don't need it in Vista, but it'd be very nice to get BF2142 on the highest, and some better graphics in Crysis/FSX
But a better gfx card - that'd mean at least a 8600 wouldn't it? I know all 8xxx's got DX10 which is better than DX9 - but the chip isn't necessarily faster, right?

Re: Looking for a cheap upgrade...
 

Actually, a 7900GT is really good, and trust me, the upgrade to a C2D is well worth it.

I used to run on a P4 524 with 1GB DDR400 and my 7900GS, then when I upgraded to a C2D E6600 with 2GB DDR2800, my performance shot up a lot; albeit, I did get an extra 1GB of RAM that was twice as fast... but that wouldn't have given me the up I got.

Even though your P4 runs at 3.5GHz, it is a single core processor that runs extremely hot. If you got a C2D, even at 1.8GHz, you would have more L1, L2 cache, and faster FSB, and better technology and architecture... meaning that more data can be processed at lower frequencies and a lot lower temperatures.

You just have to make ultra sure that your mobo supports a C2D, some LGA775 socket motherboards do not support above a Pentium D.

If you really want to run Crysis at high settings, a good 8600 or any 8800 is the best, but like arcade stated, an 8800 will definitely be bottlenecked by the P4 most likely causing your fps in Crysis to suffer A LOT; and besides, with a C2D and a 7900GT, you could tweak Crysis to run at high... and it's the only way you'll be able to play BF2142 at higher settings.

Re: Looking for a cheap upgrade...
 

One thing you can do to test what Epic is saying is to go to this site,

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest

...and see for yourself where you fall short on requirements. There are a lot of games that will say you pass on minimum reqs but fail on recommended reqs due to not having a good dual core CPU like the Core 2.

That isn't to say you couldn't also get quite a boost from a better GPU, but when you're looking for cost effectiveness in upgrading you replace the weakest link first. Now that a lot of games make use of multicore CPUs that is often the processor.

Re: Looking for a cheap upgrade...
 

Right, I did the scan on BF2142, which I've done before but I don't think I saw the recommended tab, and it says I got 2 processors running? Is that the HT thing? Also, it says I have a cpu speed of 3.52GHz rated at 5.28GHz? HT again? I don't know anything about all this so I'm sorry if my questions are kinda dumb.

EDIT OH HEY IT'S AN EDIT: I found this C2D E4500 2.2GHz - it's the cheapest one out there, at least here it is, at more than 2GHz. Might give it a go, at least the value of my computer won't drop by doing it.