Radeon HD3850 overclock

Oh, and I suppose it's not worth doing if you only get a few fps extra but in some situations 3-4 fps can help boost smoothness. My cpu is an old P4 3ghz, so again I know it's bottlenecked and probably pointless, but it's actually not bad for older games. Just tryin to squeeze the last bit of life out of it lol! Thx

xdantespardax

First is your card agp or pci-e. If pci-e then you can cheaply upgrade your cpu and board at very little cost but if agp your options will be limited. Personally I got a 3870 that I have pushed to 850 core but didn't touch the mem.

Hi, it's agp so I'm pretty much stuck with it unless I get a new pc. Did you use ati tray tools, and did you increase slowly testing along the way? I just don't want to increase it up to that level and kill the card lol!

xdantespardax

Riva Tuner and by the way mine is a pci-e based version and has a dual slot cooler.

@ xdantespardax,I have an old dell P4 with the agp hd 3850.The card will overclock pretty well,But....Your cpu is bottlenecked at stock clocks so there is really no use.Srry it sucks I know.Depending on what games your playing there are tweaks you can make to the game itself that will make a real deference.Take cod4 for example.using a modded config file i was able to keep 35-50 fps & games like oblivion can be heavily modded for performance gains.I also use catalyst 9.11 as that was the only driver to offer flash acceleration for the 3000 series cards.I loved that old machine I got every penny out of it.and she still runs today as a web pc for the little ones.A 7yo & a 9yo.Google performance tweaks for the game your playing and be ready to accept the fact that some games are just to much for your system.but that dont mean not to try.best of luck!!

How much ram do you have installed? You can also try to get a faster hard drive which will help a little when it comes to loading games, programs, and on startup.

Thx guys, I thought that was the case. I have 1.5 gb ram, and actually Oblivion runs ok alot of the time (30-40fps), but it just dips down annoyingly to 19-20fps in areas like the harbour/stables.

I think I will get a new pc soon, I'm just waiting for the solid state drives to increase in capacity. That will be cool, a total system overhaul lol!

Do you know the minimum spec cpu/gpu for games at 1080p? I don't want to pay more than I need to. Cheers.

No worry's Bro.Honestly on a budget AMD/ATI cant be beet.Any of the phenom II quads will fit the bill nicely,and for single card hi resolution gaming I would say the hd 5830 or up.
The reason I Say one of the phenoms is that the lower amd Cpu's have weak L2 cache and no L3 at all. If money is really tight try a phenom X 3 it would Also do well,and may unlock.I just finished my system and I took the gamble on a phenom II x2 to unlock and it worked out well for me but I really suggest getting the quad if you can afford it.I only took the gamble because money is extremely tight right now.Best of luck and let us know what you decide.