Doesn't Feel Fast for a Gaming PC

[Jrod]

The FX is fast, but the new vid cards take a lot of cpu power to reach their potential...so it could be that, or it could be the Vista drivers, or it could be you're extremely picky.

 

[Sora]

Yea I was just going to say this...the 8800GTX is the fastest card out there now and a single core just may be bottlenecking it, plus the fact that games like Oblivion see a big performance increase with Dual-Cores in general, that's like a double negative for you.

 

[Poizen22]

I honestly have never had a problem with graphics due to a slower hard drive. 7200 RPM is fine.

Are your drivers up to date?

he only has a 8 mb cache tho teh 16 mb cache is almost 2 times faster

 

[Evergreen]

he only has a 8 mb cache tho teh 16 mb cache is almost 2 times faster

Not nearly. And it definitely will NOT affect his FPS in games. The extra cache helps mostly when moving files around. And most textures are loaded on the loading screen, and I *believe* that they're stored in the Graphics card's memory temporarily.

 

[vipersrt_10]

Does a processor make that much of a difference to the fps within a game? thought it mainly affected the loading times. I can see where it will affect the game when objects are loaded in as well as textures, but once it is loaded doesnt it get sent to the graphics card for buffering ready to be displayed?

Besides, I have the fastest single core AMD processor out . Might have to try my 3DMark '06 and see what it says.

 

[Poizen22]

u will still get better results from a duel core look i got the second fastest single core cpu and its still preaty slow

 

[Meithan]

Does a processor make that much of a difference to the fps within a game?

Check out this analysis: GeForce 8800 Needs The Fastest CPU. They compare two systems with nearly identical specs, except the CPU: an FX-60 vs. an X6800. The system with the faster CPU showed a rather dramatic performance increase in games.

Here's a graph showing their results (if you're too lazy to go through all the article):

The vertical % scale is the overall performance increase (in FPS) obtained when switching from the FX-60 to the X6800 (the rest of the system being as identical as possible). You can see that at normal resolutions (1024x768 to 1600x1200), a system with an 8800GTX is severely CPU-limited.

So yes, the processor can make a large difference in games if the video card is fast enough.

vipersrt_10: In your case, I'm guessing you could see similar results if you go from your FX-57 to an E6700 - but I understand it's a large investment (new CPU, new motherboard, new RAM).

 

[augest]

Next month if Intel does indeed cut prices, The 6700 should be 312$ or around that.