overall speed upgrade question

[Drew]

Hey all
Running a Intel D975XBX2 motherboard 4gigs of ddr667 ram and Core2 duo 1.86
and Nvidia 7900gs vid card and I am curious what would be the best bang for
the buck speed upgrade some might suggest.. I play games like Company of
Heroes as well as racing simulators ( Rfactor and GTR2)and flight sims
(Microsoft's flight sim X.) I am not necessarily having any problems but
would like advice on next upgrade

 

[Drew]

Hey all
Running a Intel D975XBX2 motherboard 4gigs of ddr667 ram and Core2 duo
1.86 and Nvidia 7900gs vid card and I am curious what would be the best
bang for the buck speed upgrade some might suggest.. I play games like
Company of Heroes as well as racing simulators ( Rfactor and GTR2)and
flight sims (Microsoft's flight sim X.) I am not necessarily having any
problems but would like advice on next upgrade

Something I should have added to the original is yes I am running all the
latest drivers as well as keeping the computer in peak operating condition
(defrags regularly ,disk cleanup etc as well as running Avast (antivirus)
and Counterspy (anti spyware) scanned regularly

 

[Mick Murphy]

http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...8d6-427a-48d6-84dc-a91a6c9fbb45&lang=en&cr=us

Ask in the Vista game Newsgroup.
They would know.

 

[Andy [YaYa]]

Hey all
Running a Intel D975XBX2 motherboard 4gigs of ddr667 ram and Core2 duo
1.86 and Nvidia 7900gs vid card and I am curious what would be the
best bang for the buck speed upgrade some might suggest.. I play games
like Company of Heroes as well as racing simulators ( Rfactor and
GTR2)and flight sims (Microsoft's flight sim X.) I am not necessarily
having any problems but would like advice on next upgrade

CPU...

Get a nice Quad Core. Doesn't have to be the best. I'm running a Q6600,
I like it, a lot.

Next would be Vista if you're running XP, get Home Professional or
Ultimate RETAIL. Since you upgrade your computer, getting Retail so you
can legally take your OS to new systems, is the way to go.

Lastly would be video, I use a 8800GT, but the new ATi 4850 or 4870 has
won a ton of rewards for their price and performance vs. "faster" nVidia
cards like the 280gtx. I would go with one of those. Not the ATi 3000
series, go for the 4850 or 4870

An option anywhere along those lines would be to upgrade your hard drive
array. I run 3 x 320 gig, basic Seagate drives, but I use the first for
my C: drive and the other 2 I stripe (RAID0) for my D: drive. Make sure
you run your pagefile.sys on the D:\ drive for extra speed with the
virtual memory file.

Good luck.

 

[Curious]

I think a top of the line from the new NVIDIA 9xxx series cards would
provide the best gain.

 

[Drew]

Andy...I should have mentioned, (Brain fart ! ) I am running Vista business
and have been since the very first day it came out...I am running the 32bit
edition but I do own the 64bit and both are retail. I am looking at the
Q6600 as well as a couple of Ati 4670s.. I also have twin 160gig Seagate's
sata1.5's and I was looking at maybe a sata 3.. In your opinion for this
would 64bit get me better performance !!

 

[Curious]

Since the 64 bit OS is coded in 64 bit the OS itself will perform better.
You will probably see no gain in the performance of your 32 bit
applications. If you switch to 64 bit I would also suggest upgrading to 4GB
of memory since 64 bit does consume more memory.

 

[Andy [YaYa]]

I think a top of the line from the new NVIDIA 9xxx series cards would
provide the best gain.

Good choice as well, personally the 4850 is about the same speed and costs
much less. Also you can get the 4870 for a little more. I'm not an ATi
supporter, but I have developed games on them and they are an excellent
video card. I have the 8800 gt because at the time it was the best bang for
the buck, now it's ATis turn. 4850 crossfire is faster than some 260 gtx
SLI setups, and costs 1/3 the price.

Just putting it out there. Like I said, I don't think you need a new card
right now. Who knows what nVidia will do in a month or so.

 

[Andy [YaYa]]

Andy...I should have mentioned, (Brain fart ! ) I am running Vista
business and have been since the very first day it came out...I am
running the 32bit edition but I do own the 64bit and both are retail.
I am looking at the Q6600 as well as a couple of Ati 4670s.. I also
have twin 160gig Seagate's sata1.5's and I was looking at maybe a sata
3.. In your opinion for this would 64bit get me better performance !!

I would definatly go 64-bit if you can. It won't get better performance
unless the game has a 64-bit client, not many do. Half Life: Source
games, Supreme Commander, and a bunch of other mainstream titles have
64-bit versions available, so I'd say it's worth the investment. I do
retail work part time, and probably 2/3'rds of the systems we sell (Best
Buy) are running 3+ gigs of ram with Vista 64-bit, so hey everyone, 64-
bit OS's are finally in the majority! Woot! I don't even think OS X is
running 64-bit yet, but I may be wrong.

Hard Drives, up to you, they are cheap as hell now. Don't RAID0 your C:
drive, or just keep backups if you do.

Yeah, I'm not 100% sure I got the ATi model numbers right, but HardOCP
site seems to think a crossfire ATi setup of the cards one down from top
of the line (they cost like $149 each) is the best way to go now.

I've never played around with SLI or Crossfire, it just seems like a
waste of moolah to me, but I can't deny that makes a difference.

 

[Wandering]

If you don't have a particular and important software that requires 64 bit,
you will find that quite a number of 32 bit software titles will actually
run slower under a 64 bit operating system. It has to wrap a layer of extra
stuff to support the 32 bit, and it drastically slows down. Once most titles
are available, and you have them, in 64 bit, things will change.

I don't recommend trying to run mostly 32 bit stuff under a 64 bit system.
One example is flash, which has no 64 bit version and the kludges that try
to do it are indeed kludges.

Good luck.