Masters of the CPU: How do I know when I need a CPU upgrade or a VCard

Long time watcher, first time poster


I have a . . now on 2 years old I would say. . computer. AMD 4200+ 2.2Ghz with 2gig of ram

The video card is a Geforce 7950 GT.

So what is the good rule of thumb on swapping out my CPU (which I can't really) or the video card?

Would I gain much in FPS if I moved up the video card but left the CPU alone? Or do I pretty much need a power cpu to power the Video card?

thanks

Good Advice, though I've got a prebuilt. . . I don't think there is a good way to unlock the overclock

Doh!!!

Guess you should make that a hand me down, or sell it. And save up for a killer build then.

I have X2 4200+ and it is enough for any game I have tried, only a bit lacking on NFS Pro Street but that is poorly optimized game. Don't know if Yours is single core or X2. If it is X2 on AM2 socket with DDR2 then GPU upgrade would make more sense. 8800 GT/GTS 512Mb or HD 4850/4870 would be good choices here. If it is single core with DDR then probably better look to build a new system.

It's a dual core, the single only went up to 4000+. It won't be a severe bottleneck for a 4850, i'd go for it. Of course, an OC would help if possible.

Oh it is a Dual Core 64x2 4200

upgrade ur GPU.....ur CPU wont really bottleneck cards like 8800GT......it will be totally worth

You should get some decent milage out of it upgrading your card to something like an 8800GT or 4850. Anything faster will probably be bottlenecked by your CPU at most games if your resolution is around 1280x1024. You may also want to upgrade your RAM depending on your RAM type and how much RAM you have. DDR2 RAM is pretty cheap now adays.

If it's DDR and you have 4 slots then you can upgrade to 4GB. Of course 2GB of DDR 400 is around $55 bucks now. Not bad if you have 2 1GB sticks on there already, but if your going to have to buy all 4GB then that is going to run around $110 and suddenly that doesn't look as good ^_^.

You don't need to unlock the multiplier to overclock, altho it would be nice. You can overclock by increasing the Front Side Bus assuming your BIOS has any options to allow you to do so. If it's DDR and if you can lower the speed of your RAM you may also want to do that before you start overclocking otherwise the RAM speed will quickly limit your overclocking ability.

A modern CPU (Intel or AMD) with dual cores running 3Ghz will feed any GFX card made just fine and XP with 2GB of RAM will out preform Vista with 4GB of RAM.

I'd probably upgrade just the GPU, in your case. If your going to budget more than $300-400 or so, than you can afford a complete upgrade of system.
I'd look at one of these GPU's:
$70-100 4670/9600gso/3850
$100-$150 9800gt/3870
$150-$200 4850 512mb

So depending on your budget, I'd consider one of the above options.

Major GPU upgrade on OEM computer most likely ='s power supply upgrade

(i.e., Radeon HD 4850 pulls twice the wattage of your 7950gt)

Well I'm still seeing benchmarks of XP outperforming Vista SP1 in gaming, network transfer rates and encoding. At best it gets very close and under some rare circumstances you'd see vista ahead within the margin of error. So until there's some valid unbiased numbers available (even a dual booting forum member) it boils down to whether you need it, rather than a few numbers (which as I said are close but neither benchmark nor theory puts vista in the lead). Advertising is where someone forces you to need something you don't need.

OK, heres the link. http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=g [...] rticID=869

I've already decided to dual boot and see for myself. I'm getting 4GB of memory anyway so I might as well go for a 64bit OS.

Personally, I don't have Vista. Crap. . .I guess that means I need to get Vista to get the most out of DX10 card? Isn't DX10 Vista only?

I'm leaning toward the 9800 GT.