Upgrade question for ya's

[Todd32]

Hey all..I'm in sort of a tech dilemma here. I'm a big gamer..games I'm currently playing are BattleField Vietnam and Far Cry..I have pretty low FPS on both games and have to run my in game settings pretty low in order for them to run anywhere near playable at all. I'm consider an upgrade but I'm not sure which direction to go. Sys specs are..

P4 1.6Ghz on Aopen MX4B Mobo with 400Mhz fsb.
Geforce FX 5600XT 128 MB Graphics card.
1Gb DDR pc2700 RAM.

I know my Vid card and CPU+Mobo are a bit dated but I'm just not sure if I would be wiser to put money into a high end Video Card..Geforce FX 5900 or Radeon 9800 Pro, or if I should put the money into a new Motherboard+CPU Combo. Everywhere I go to ask at retail stores it seems like they always try and sway me to buy whatever is the more expensive of the two and I'm not sure if I'm getting legitimate advice or not from them. Any help on this matter will be greatly appreciated..Thx in advance all!!

 

[ChaosBlizzard]

Get a better brand motherboard. I never liked aopen anything, there a little on the cheap side, in quality I mean. Also I would recommend the Radeon, I have one and so does my dad, any most of my friends, were all happy with them.

 

[Elbatrop1]

I'd say change the motherboard first. With these motherboards, you can use your existing RAM and CPU (even though they wont be filling up the mobo's potential):

http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/socket478/p4p800/overview.htm
http://www.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=P4C800 Deluxe&langs=09

This way you can upgrade in pieces if you want. The next thing I would get would be a new processor. Maybe go with an intel 2.60C GHz or a 2.80C GHz.

You said you have PC2700 RAM and a CPU 400 MHz FSB. With that combo, your RAM isn't at it's full potential either. PC2700 RAM is at its best when you have a FSB of 533 MHz.

With those mobos I gave links to, you might be able to use the RAM, but you should have no problem with putting the CPU on those mobos.

Hope that gets you started

 

[fadedstar]

First of all, i'm quite surprised you are not having good results with this setup. Never tried any of these games yet but I know they are quite new.

Latest game I tried so far is Call of Duty and it works really great on my setup. I also have a GeForce FX 5600 (not the XT, don't know if it's better or not).

How many FPS do you get for considering this low?

Compared to Call of Duty, is Battlefield Vietnam more demanding on the system?

If you want to upgrade your system for cheap, go with AMD and you won't be disappointed. Find a board using the nforce2 chipset and put a 2400+ processor on it or better. Make sure your board support dual channel RAM memory for a couple more FPS. The MSI K7N2 Delta-L is quite cheap and very good.

You'll also be able to get a good price for your pentium and mobo on eBay so that will help you finding the funds for a good upgrade.

But hey, switching from a pentium 4 1.7 to let say an Athlon XP 2400+ platform will give you no more than around 15% improve in performance, according to tomshardware : http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030217/cpu_charts-23.html

At this point, I think that a better videocard will improve much more than a cpu switch.

But once again, let me say that i'm quite surprised that you can't run Battlefield Vietnam quite well with your system. Did you try Call of Duty?!

.fs.

 

[Todd32]

FadedStar..I do still play COD occassionally and my sys runs it really well and even the original BF1942 runs great but BFV and Far Cry are both real graphics hogs. Usually in BFV i get an average fps of 20-35. Just wasn't sure if, with my current mobo and CPU if it would really help much if I got a better Video Card.
One thing to keep in mind though is that BFV hasen't been patched yet so some of these issues might be just game related.
But regardless my wife said I could spend some money so I had better before she changes her mind..lol!! Thx for all the help guys really Appreciate it!