Bottleneck Where... mobile Barton?

Titanion

May 17, 2006 5:26:30 AM

It has been two years since my last PC building obsession... and I am now two years behind the times... my main desktop is the one in red below in my sig with the 98000 Pro. If I added an AGP X800 series video card and perhaps another GB or Ram, where would my bottleneck be?

Would it be my mobile Barton running around 2.4 GHz? Would it be the NF7-S motherboard chipset? And with these bottlenecks in mind, would going from 1GB to 2 GB in Ram give me anything in performance? In addition, with going from a 9800 Pro to an X800 series AGP card give me much either?

If my CPU and motherboard cannot make excellent use of a ram increase and a video card upgrade, then I will noit do it. But if it can, I might consider, for it looks like I should wait another year to build anew from scratch.

Please just give me a sense of what is going on in my system in terms of performance and limitations. NWN2 will likely be my main game, but I do like a nice FPS game now and then...

More about : bottleneck mobile barton

| E-mail me updates
| Report abuse

jaguarskx

CPUs Master

May 17, 2006 6:24:27 AM

You shouldn't have a problem with bottlenecks in your system. The X800 is not so fast that your Athlon XP-M would hold it back.

2GB of RAM is good as long as the programs/games you use take advantage of it.

Since you AXP-M is clocked at 2.4GHz, I don't think that should be much of a bottleneck even for the 7800GS.

| Report abuse

Titanion

May 17, 2006 9:42:18 PM

Thanks... perhaps I will bumb the multiplier up another .5 for a while just to see...

Just need to make a decision about a video card now...

| Report abuse

Anoobis

May 17, 2006 10:25:23 PM

I had/have a similiar XP-M 2600 setup using a 6600GT. After a little research and some advice from Cleeve, I bought an X800XL for it. Most of what I read, as well as Cleeve, said it would compliment the system quite nicely.

However, my mom's PC had an "unfortunate" accident and I had to give her my XP system and build a newer one for me. I didn't get the chance to install the X800XL because I needed to return it for the money, but the idea is still the same. I would say an X800 series would do your system justice.

As far as the RAM, I was getting by just fine with 1 GB but about all I played was HL2 and CS:S most of the time. I only ran the F.E.A.R demo & not the game while I had that system, but it ran quite well. I think the only issue holding me back there was the 6600GT and not the lack of RAM.

| Report abuse