Need advice on improving my tower

[asthmabubble]

I need some suggestions on how to improve my gaming performance. I don't want to trash the system yet, just looking for new ways to improve framerate and resolution on my games.


Here is what I have

AMD Athlon 64 3400 2.4 Ghz
1.5 Gig RAM
500 watt PS
Dynex Gaming tower (2 80mm in front, 92mm in back, and additonal 92mm on PS)
ATI Radeon X1550 512mb, AGP interface.


I am currently playing alot of COD4 and WoW. So any tips or tools that would be useful would be appreciated. Also running ATI tool for over clocking. I know the card isn't the best, actually I know its not very good. Sounded good to begin with, but found out hard way. Again I am not really looking to spend any money on new stuff. Possible heatsink for processor. Socket 754 if you know of any good ones.

 

[theTHiiiNG]

If you can't afford to spend any money on new hardware theres not really anything that is going to make a huge difference.

As for changing the heatsink, is there a reason you want to? Does your cpu run hot?

 

[deadcells]

What is your RAM config? i.e. if you have 1GB + 512MB then i know you don't want to spend money but try and get another 1GB stick (cheap!!!) and ditch the 512. Try and get exactly the same RAM as your other 1 GB. Running your mem in dual channel mode (hopefully your board supports it) might help somewhat.

Changing the heatsink may help if you plan on overclocking the cpu... if not then don't bother.

 

[deadcells]

by the way... you could reduce on the number of services etc running on your pc. This will free up resources for your games to use.

Another thing that worked for me was creating a small partition on a secondary hard drive (if you have one) and using it as a dedicated page file. i.e create a 4 GB partition on a secondary drive and tell windows to use this partition as the page file. N.B. keep a small pf on the primary drive in case the secondary drive fails.

Make sure not to put any files on this partition so access remains fast.