Where my bottleneck?

[pileofme]

I use my PC mostly just for games. It's getting a little old now so I'm looking into doing some upgrades. I was wondering which singal component upgrade would lead to the most significant gains in game performance for games such as Dawn of ar II and World of Warcraft. Here are my specs:

Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz
2gb Total Memory
GeForce 9800 GT (1GB, 1.5GHz) GPU
Mainboard : Dell Inc. 0WG864
Chipset: Dell P965/G965
FSB : 4x 200MHz (800MHz)
Storage Devices : 160GB
Microsoft Windows Vista Home 32bit

 

[geofelt]

As a rule, upgrading the vga card will help games the most. You already have a good card. If you upgrade, get something a couple of levels higher like a GTX260-216 or GTX285. Otherwise you will be disappointed. You may have to upgrade your psu to do this.

I think a very cost -effective upgrade would be to 4gb of ram. A 4gb kit can cost as little as $25 a/r (corsair).
Even with your 32 bit os, you will get some benefit in minimum frame rates. Here's why:
http://www.corsairmemory.com/_appnotes/AN804_Gaming_Performance_Analysis.pdf

Some P965 motherboards can take a C2D processor with a bios update; can yours?

 

[pileofme]

I've done alot of investigation as to what CPU upgrades I can make, and I have found that several people have got the Core 2 Quad Q6600 up and running on this same rig with the 2.4.0 BIOS from Dell. It is an option I am considering, but would something as simple as going from 2gb to 4gb of RAM result in a greater improvement to video quality and frames per second in video games?

 

[geofelt]

Try to assess how cpu bound you are while playing games.
Turn on the task monitor, and see how much cpu you are actually using.
If you are pegged at 85% to 100%, then you have a cpu limitation.
If the rate is less than 65%, then the cpu is probably not hurting you, and a better vga card is in order.

 

[pileofme]

I did alot of testing and it looks like, at least while playing World of Warcraft, I never really get above 70% CPU usage. However, I am almost always at 0MB free memory. Is this typical or is it an indication that a RAM upgrade is needed?

 

[croc]

I did alot of testing and it looks like, at least while playing World of Warcraft, I never really get above 70% CPU usage. However, I am almost always at 0MB free memory. Is this typical or is it an indication that a RAM upgrade is needed?

Sounds to me as if you have answered your own question...

 

[demonhorde665]

as a rule of thumb upgrade ram first given your problems ... then later (in amonth or two whenever you get the money ) upgrade your cpu as well if i'm not mistaken a pentium D is a single core chip right ??? most modern games that came out in 08 and defintiely most comign in the future will be multi threaded and having dual or quad core chip you will see MASSIVE gains on these newer titles.

p.s. im on a dual core amd athy , and neither core goes over 50% ever , with the exception of when im running 3ds max , or running crysis some processes in 3ds max will make it shoot as high as 80% and on crysis i never see any one core go over 64% . granted last i checked WoW was NOT a multithreaded application /game. So if Wow is the only game you ever really play then a cpu upgrade may be pointless. However if you have dreams of newer games such as Fallout 3 or bio shock , or crysis, or you are on a game art design major in college (like myself), then you should definitely look at going dual core or quad (if possible).

 

[pileofme]

Cool, thanks for all the info. I think I will upgrade to 4GB ram first and check the improvements I get from that. If for some reason it's not all that great, I'll later go for a new CPU. Not like that extra RAM will hurt anything and its cheap anyways.

 

[Zorg]

The Pentium D is a dual core Netburst, hence the "D".

 

[jitpublisher]

Two things you need to do if you want more performance.
If you are running Vista, 4 gig of memory does make a difference. over 2.
Just add 2 more gig of the IDENTICAL memory you have, won't make a world of difference but it will help a little. The reason it won't make a big difference leads me to the second thing you need to look at......

Your processor.

Example....used to have a Athlon X2 4600+(which is a solid 50% faster than the Pentium D you have) and an 8800GTS 512, which would post 10,000 in 3Dmark 06.
Upgraded to a Phenom II 920, my score jumped to 15,000, and boy you can tell it for sure when gaming.
So the point I am getting to here is if my old Athlon was not driving my 8800 to it's full potential, your Pentium D is a substantial bottleneck when matched to a 9800 series GPU.

 

[pileofme]

One more thing.

If I end up getting the Q6600 and upgrading to 4GB of ram, what is the best ram I can get for this CPU at around $75?

 

[daship]

WoW is a CPU based game.