Small improvement

[NeilV]

Hi All,
I'm currently running a
E6550 OC'd to 3.0 Ghz on an
Asrock 4Core 1600Twins P35 with
4 Gb of Kingston HyperX RAM
PC HD 4850 512 DDR4 RAM
on Win7 Ultimate 64bit

and I'm experiencing a little bit of jerkyness playing Fallout New Vegas @ ultra High 1650 Res

I don't have a lot of money so was thinking of either;

Replacing my DDR2 with DDR3 (but the MOBO will only support 4Gb)
Crossfiring my HD 4850 (but can't seem to find one now!!)
Increasing to 8Gb of Kingston HyperX RAM (but I don't seem to be using what I've got)

I've read that DDR3 is not a big advantage unless you have a CPU which will take advantage of it, also this MOBO is limited on FSB I think. Here is a link to the MOBO incase anyone can give me any advise;
http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?model=4core1600twins-p35

When I say not much money, I'm looking @ something under £50 really as a B'day present from my parents.

Thanks in advance

 

[Maziar]

Hello and welcome to the forums
You've read right,going from 4GB DDR2 RAM to the same amount but with DDR3 won't give you much of a performance boost.(Going to 8GB also won't give you a huge boost in games).
The best option is getting a new card(You have a P35 board which supports Crossfire at x16x4 and since its a PCI-E 1.0 board,then it doesn't perform as well as dual x8/x16,so don't Crossfire your card).
However,you won't find a card which is faster than 4850 for under £50,so you may want to wait until you can spend more.

 

[NeilV]

Hello and welcome to the forums
You've read right,going from 4GB DDR2 RAM to the same amount but with DDR3 won't give you much of a performance boost.(Going to 8GB also won't give you a huge boost in games).
The best option is getting a new card(You have a P35 board which supports Crossfire at x16x4 and since its a PCI-E 1.0 board,then it doesn't perform as well as dual x8/x16,so don't Crossfire your card).
However,you won't find a card which is faster than 4850 for under £50,so you may want to wait until you can spend more.

Thanks Maziar,
I've read a couple of articles say more than 4Gb of ram can be useful for storing textures etc for some games but surely I would see that usage in the Desktop gadet which is reporting my CPU/RAM usage.

Slightly off topic, any idea how many games these days take advantage of nCore arcitecture?

 

[Maziar]

8GB RAM will help in heavy image/video editing.It doesn't make much of a difference in today's games.
And currently most games run fine with a dual core CPU;however, there are some titles like GTA IV,Prototype,WIC(along with some other RTS games) Etc. which benefit from quad core CPUs too.

 

[Motopsychojdn]

+1, I'd say ask the parents to contribute towards a new card,
Get some online reviews of something and explain the benefits of the upgrade,
It should ease Dads wallet opening if he knows you've done some research and not just want 'the shiny one wiff bloo lights on'
4Gb of ram is plenty for gaming as Maz says, although you may find Win7's Readyboost helps you a bit instead of buying more ram, just dedicate a 2/4Gb flashdrive to it and leave it in the pc,
otherwise that set up's all fine, only other thing I can see as an improvement when budget allows would be a chip upgrade, but your 6550 should be doing its job fine imo and I'd say plan a new build over improving this one.
Moto

 

[NeilV]

Thank you Maziar & Motopsychojdn. I would like, as you said, to get a Quad core cpu but since I'm stuck on the 775 socket, they are a bit expensive! I'm using an i5 750 @ work and this is pretty good but I fear a Quad core will have to be on my next build (and I don't want to do that for a couple of years!)

I may still get more RAM, it occured to me after posting that I could assign some of it to a Virtual machine when I'm running one of those for different reasons. I don't know whether it would help when running things like SQL SERVER as I haven't had to work from home for a while.

I'm a little gutted that me attempt @ future proofing has come to nothing, I thought have the ability to move up to DDR3 when the price came down and go SLI when I could afford it was being clever but it appears my reasons for buying this MOBO might have been in error. :lol: :lol:

I appreciate all your advice, I've been chastised by the Mrs. for having to many DVD's & Games 'lying around' and thought a conservative component mod (which sits inside the PC, not getting in her way!!) might have been productive.

Thanks again to all of you.

See you on the next upgrade. :lol: :lol: