Where's the bottleneck?

[tahayassen]

2 incredibly old rigs:

E3400
4 GB DDR RAM
4650 AGP

E3400
4 GB DDR3 RAM
GT 240

Where is the bottleneck in both these rigs?

 

[ebalong]

Are you asking if upgrading one or more components of either system will improve performance without having to build from scratch? Because, I would say that with the first one, everything is the bottleneck, and with the second, the processor and card are the bottleneck.

With the first one, it looks like the motherboard does not support PCI-E? If this is the case, any relatively newer card is out of reach. On the second system, you might be able to upgrade the graphics to a low-end GTX (possibly), and then the processor would be the bottleneck.

Are you wanting to play newer games, or what are you wanting to do?

What power supply do you have?

 

[tahayassen]

Are you asking if upgrading one or more components of either system will improve performance without having to build from scratch? Because, I would say that with the first one, everything is the bottleneck, and with the second, the processor and card are the bottleneck.

With the first one, it looks like the motherboard does not support PCI-E? If this is the case, any relatively newer card is out of reach. On the second system, you might be able to upgrade the graphics to a low-end GTX (possibly), and then the processor would be the bottleneck.

Are you wanting to play newer games, or what are you wanting to do?

No, they're just secondary rigs that I have lying around in the house. I'm not looking to upgrade either one. I just figured that I would overclock either the CPU or the GPU. Not both. Why? Because there's no point of overclocking a GPU when the CPU is the bottleneck.

Also, what do you mean everything is the bottleneck for the first rig? So in other words, there is no bottleneck in the first one?

 

[killersquirel11]

Why don't you experiment and find the bottleneck yourself?

Overclock the GPU and see how that affects performance, then do the same to the CPU. Whichever had the bigger effect was the bottleneck...

 

[tahayassen]

Why don't you experiment and find the bottleneck yourself?

Overclock the GPU and see how that affects performance, then do the same to the CPU. Whichever had the bigger effect was the bottleneck...

I'm not quite sure how to look at the GPU usage and CPU usage in a game... Both rigs are primarily used to run a game called League of Legends, but how do I run a benchmark on that game if it has no built-in benchmarking software?

FRAPS only gives you FPS benchmarks I believe.

 

[kevin83]

Unigine's Heaven and earlier demos work great as benchmarks, and MSI's afterburner works great for graphics card overclocking. CPU overclocking requires a motherboard-specific tool usually.

 

[killersquirel11]

Bottlenecks vary on a game-to-game basis. I don't know the ones for LoL off the top of my head. Your best bet is to use FRAPS to show FPS (or IIRC LoL has its own FPS counter in the top-right), and keep track of them as you head up a lane at the beginning of a game (preferably try to be in about the same spot and watch for a couple of seconds to get an average). You'd need to play a couple games (one with no OC, one with GPU OC, one with CPU OC, and possibly one with both) and compare the average frame rates to decide what's the best way to go for your system.

 

[iam2thecrowe]

depends on the game and resolution. But both the video card and CPU will not play the latest games well. If I was going to upgrade one or the other, i'd upgrade the cpu first.

 

[Outlander_04]

2 incredibly old rigs:

E3400
4 GB DDR RAM
4650 AGP

E3400
4 GB DDR3 RAM
GT 240

Where is the bottleneck in both these rigs?

turning them on

 

[ebalong]

^ That's sort of what I was getting at, when I offered my opinion, on the first system especially.