Which bottleneck does my system have?

[Guest]

850 p3 cpu, 312MB of SDRAM ram running at 133, CPU running at 100. it has a old asus motherboard, p3v4x, via chipset, non-working AGP4x, running at AGP2x, geforce2. windows xp. ata66 IDE. 7200rpm HD etc.

now i want to improve performance, mostly in games like the rest of us, and thinking of getting a geforceti4400/4600. the problem is in deciding which i should upgrade first. few questions:

1) will i receive diminishing returns in terms of performance by upgrading to a faster geforce4, since maybe my system is so old/slow? ie: some games which tax the CPU more will still lag, regardless of how fast my videocard is?

2) will i see the difference between a ti4400 and a ti4600 on running on my system?

3) will upgrading to a faster CPU/RAM/System actually yield better 3d game performance boosts than upgrading my videocard?

thanks for your time guys

 

[Guest]

I would upgrade the cpu/mobo instead of getting the Geforce4. Get a good price/performance deal, like the ESC K7S5A and a 1600+ Athlon XP, lots of sites sell these two together, at very low prices. You can still use your RAM, and you can still upgrade in the future.

 

[Unolocogringo]

You could just overclock the system you have. If you can push it to 120 fsb on the cpu it would give you a 1020mhzcpu speed. a 20% in increase.

Plus if you overclocked the video . You would gain another 5-10% .

I have this motherboard also. You can enable 4/way memory interleave and AGP 4x with a program called Beta 4/way. Dissable fast writes and side band addressing. these cause instability. Update to the latest Via drivers. Uninstall the old ones first by running the install program and but selecting uninstall instead. Reinstall drivers and Install Agp in turbo made. You may have to adjust the drive strength for the agp.

I found Beta 4/way on the geforce FAQ page' If you want to try this and can't find it email or PM me.

I aint signing nothing!!!

 

[Guest]

i usually do run it in an overclocked state. not quite at 120, i believe it's at 110 something atm. i'm running my ram at 3/2*FSB, but my RAM couldn't take it if it's running too fast, and this was the best most stable configuration i could come up with.

i already do overclock the video the highest it can go.

what i'm intrested in is running games at the 1280/1600 resolution, at 32bit color. maybe with 2x or 4x AA on at 1280 if the game doesn't support it any higher. with full graphic options on, and a nice constant 50-60 frames per second.

but is my system going to be holding me back from achieving that? or is what i'm asking from my system completely capable of being tackled on by a geforceti4400/4600?

 

[Guest]

oh yah. Does the program you're talking about achieve the same thing as the WPRSet utilities from the Via website had up for few months now? enable 4/way, and gives you a nice range of motherboard options?