For a while now, I've thought my home PC was a little more sluggish than it should be. I thought it was down to RAM, only having 512mb, so two nights ago I fitted an extra gig. Made an improvement, but not by much

I ran PCMark05 benchmarking and got 2620, whereas a system like mine on their comparison service, got over 4200, with the difference being he has 2gig RAM, mine has 1.5, his had 128mb graphics RAM, mine has 512Mb.

The system is:-

Pentium 4 3.4Ghz CPU LGA775 (I think its 64 bit with hyper-threading)
1.5Gb RAM - 2x256Mb, 2x512Mb PC3200 DDR ram.
Abit AGP motherboard
Nvidia Geforce 4 6200 AGP graphics card with 512Mb RAM
Soundblaster Live PCI card
Wireless network card

1x floppy
1x DVD reader
1x DVD writer
3x hard drives, 2 IDE, one SATA. One for Windows ©, one for Applications (D), one for data (E). Plenty of space on my Windows drive for swapfile.

Running Windows XP Pro SP2 all patched and up-to-date. Latest drivers.

I left the machine running 3DMark2005 this morning, although the frame rates were pathetic, I'll find out the results later when/if I get home.

Any suggestions of what to do.

 

Graphics card is ****e. Thats the bottle neck. Get a better AGP card - Something like a 6800GT or ultra or a X800XT f you can find one. AGP cards aren;t commonplace these days.

 

doesn't stop someone elses system, same mobo, same processor, same gfx card (same chipset but less video ram) having a PC Mark 05 benchmark 60% greater than mine.

 

Agreed, the graphics card is worth £19.99, the 512mb ram is no good if the GPU isn't any good. A 128mb card can be a lot faster if the GPU is running faster or is 128-256 bit rather than 64bit.

 

Have you got the proper motherboard drivers installed ?

When you go into task manager is the CPU sitting beween 1 and 3% at al times when idle ?

How many processes are running at once ?

 

will check.

meanwhile there is an X800XT on Ebay ending in a few mins - £ 70 - is this a good card? Never had an ATi card before...

 

They were the top of the line at one time, although i've seen X850XT for not much more that will trash that card.

Remember a X1950 pro is only £100 inc vat at the moment, so don't over spend.

 

X850XT - where from? Looking at buy-it-now prices on Ebay.

again X1950 Pro £ 100 inc VAT - where from? Edit: found some at Scan.

 

It all comes down to what you want to do, but you could buy these as great upgrade:

ebuyer.com - Graphics Cards » Graphics Cards ATI » ATI Radeon X1950 Range » Product details

X1950pro - £101.22 with dual DVi etc and is crossfire ready (there are cheaper out there)

• ATI Radeon X1950 PRO - 580MHz
• 256MB-256bit 8 channel GDDR3 memory - 1.40GHz
• 36 Pixel shader processor
• Ultra-threaded SM 3.0 Engine
• HDCP Ready
• Crossfire2 READY

You would need a cheap £20 PCI-E m/board - socket 775 Asus would do, your memory and hard disk are transferrable

If not the X800 AGP would do for a while

 

ebuyer.com - Motherboards » Motherboards Intel » Socket LGA 775 Intel » Product details

Even supports conroe dual core for later upgrading £33.95 inc vat with a PCI-E slot and whole raft of features

 

my main pc uses, apart from websurfing and email is a bit of gaming when I get some spare time, mainly racing games - eg Toca3, Live for Speed, and fps perspective adventures / shooters, and photography / photo editing with photoshop.

 

definately upgrade the gfx card then if you do gaming. Surprised a 6200 would run anything at a decent rate.

with regards to your probs, run spyware checkers etc to see if you something else is hogging your system, also you say you upgraded your memory, is the new memory the same speed as the older memory? maybe try removing the old 512mb and seeing if that makes a difference.

 

I frequently run spyware checkers to make sure there isn't any nasties.

I'll try removing the old memory and just have the new memory and see if there is any improvement.

 

The other thing worth bearing in mind is what settings you have on the graphics card when you run the test.

For example, running the test at 1024X768 with no AA or AF will yield a far higher score than running the same test at 1280X1024 with 4 X FSAA and 8X AF.

All test results really are is ***** waving tools. Real world performance is what matters - If you are happy with the frame rate /effects at the moment, dont upgrade just to get a higher test score.

 

I run with AA and AF turned off.

My brother and I play Live for Speed. My typical frame rate is 35 without fancy effect. His is 170 with full effects. He has the X850 Ati chipset.

 

taskmanager at idle 1% 36 processes

3dmark 05
3DMark Score 1193 3DMarks
CPU Score 4189 CPUMarks

Detailed Test Results

Game Tests
GT1 - Return To Proxycon 5.6 fps
GT2 - Firefly Forest 3.8 fps
GT3 - Canyon Flight 5.0 fps

CPU Tests
CPU Test 1 2.2 fps
CPU Test 2 3.6 fps

 

just downloaded 3Dmark06. i run it and got 8570. is that any good??

 

Would need to know what hardware you have before I could say how good the result is.

 

E6600 CPU
2gb memory
8800GTS video card

 

Seems about right. I get 5,170 with an X2 4400 and an X1950Pro.

 

So the processor is working just fine and the 3D card is no better than an inbuilt freebie. Either go for the AGP x800 for now or try the PCI-E motherboard and an X1950 pro as above, both will make a huge difference both in the test and in real world gaming and 3D geometry processing.

 

I concur Dr Lightning.

 

OK thanks for the advice.

I think I need to find my wallet

Changing to a PCI-E mobo now makes some sense, so will start doing my research.

Andrew

 

Or alternatively, save some cash and get an X1950 Pro AGP, then change to PCI-E later. There's still life left in AGP.

 

12,500

You know that there's an 880GTX in the equation somewhere

(as to OP... run msconfig and look at the startup tab, check out the processes that are set to run at startup and see which ones shouldn't be there)

 

Then download Hijackthis and see what's really getting run at start up

 

right ordered an AGP X1950 Pro. The rest of the system should be man enough for most jobs for a while yet.

 

You are in for a HUUUGE leap in performance!! Nice choice!

 

Can't wait...

Unfortuantely I'm really busy all next week and most of next weekend...


A.

 

its more likely the processes running & a pc full of sh1te. So often people at work complain their computer is slow. They got the same as me yet mine is clean & organised while theres is a mess. removed unrequired ****, defrag the HD, check processes, spyware. its makes a hellofa difference.