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What is wrong with my rig?

Forum Homebuilt Systems : General Homebuilt - What is wrong with my rig?

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I'm curious as to what is wrong with my current rig apart from that its now 3 years old (ish) looking for a big performance increase so i can play the big new games coming up (Dragon Age: Origins, Crysis 2, Mass Effect 2 etc)
Basic Current System Spec
Intel Core2 Duo 6600 @ 2.4ghz
2 GB of 3200
GeForce 7950GX 2
all running on Windows XP

Have been told that a new hard drive is gonna make a big improvement but im struggling to understand other than a faster RPM (currently on 7200 SATA Drive)how a new HD will make any difference, will be soon upgrading Memory to 4gb with windows 7 but looking to make the changes to run things generally a whole lot better. please pick holes in where i am going wrong as have had to play Crysis in minimum graphics to get a playable framerate!

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For a hard drive that is about 3 years old, it could be as many as 4 or 5 hardware generations behind what is currently available. Even if capacity doesn't increase every generation, platter data density almost always does. For example, when 1TB drives first were released, they were built using 5 platters. Today, just about all manufacturers have 1TB drives that are built with just 2 platters.

As for the rest of your system, the 4gb RAM is a good idea. From a gaming perspective, windows 7 isn't going to enhance performance a whole lot, but there are dozens of other reasons why moving to windows 7 is a good choice. Especially if you plan on going to 64-bit. The single best thing you could probably do is buy a better aftermarket cooler and overclock your CPU to 3.0 Ghz. Also, your graphics could use an upgrade, though don't go overboard with it. I'm guessing your motherboard is PCI-e 16x 1.0 going by its age. My guess would be that maybe 20% of the top cards out there are bottlenecked by the 1.0 spec, If you go with GTX 260 cards or the like, they probably won't be held back there.

Reply to wathman

Hi,

A faster HDD might give you a bit better loading times, and higher general speed of your OS/applications, but I don't think it will affect FPS in games in any way.

Apart from getting more RAM, I would get a good cooler, overclock the CPU, and get 5770 or 5850 depending on the resolution of your monitor, and your budget.