XFX Geforce 7300 LE 256

[impguardman]

Howdy. This is the current PC that I am fixing up. It has:

XFX Geforce 7300 LE 256
1 Gig Ram
Intel 2.8

Anyways the person I am fixing this for only plays World of Warcraft. He is playing it in 1024x768 and it won't hit more than 15 FPS in the best conditions.

Now I have a similar system:
AMD 3500
XFX Geforce 7600 GT
1 Gig Ram

With my setup I hit up to 80 FPS, max settings in 1440x900 rez in windowed mode. I am wondering what sort of things I should try to improve the FPS. I know the Video Card is a bit on the cheap side but it should be better than a 5500 GT, and I have seen how on a machine with a 5500 and it runs it in the 40-50FPS range.

So far tried uninstalling the hardware, drivers, reinstalling them, running an AV and AS scan and msconfig all startup items. Any ideas on what could be making this system suck preformance wise?

 

[Nitestick]

your machines are not very similar really. there is a very significant difference between the graphics cards. all i know is that the 7300 is marginally better than a 6200 and a 6200 doesn't even beat all of the GeForce 5 series cards. unless he has a very poor software setup i.e. cluttered with spyware etc or a slow internet connection i'd be willing to bet the problem is the video card.

 

[impguardman]

Hmmm, I was under the impretion that is 7300 LE would run WoW atleast to a decent degree. I'm looking for 30~ FPS on medium settings. I know this is a fairly cheap card, but I am under the impretition it would be atleast decent. I personally have a xfx geforce 7600 gt and it blasts games out of the water, why wouldn't a card in the same series atleast have the ability to run decently? If if not, any ideas on what I should try like new drivers.

 

[impguardman]

I got one quick question, besides possibly the drivers could it also be lack of power, I'm not sure what the power supply is because I am at school, but if it is 300 or less could that be the cause?

 

[Nitestick]

i doubt it. it's hard to tell though especially when i am not familiar with WoW really. you can trust me that the 7300 is relatively weak though, i've done quite a lot of research into budget cards in the past. i know i initially had the same impression with both the 6200 and 7300 (i used to own a 6200) but after some research i found they're not very impressive. the main point of them is that they are cheap cards with new features sets i.e all new shader models and so on. that means you have a fairly advanced card cheap that can at least play most modern games even if not at great settings. many games are limited by the feature sets of graphics cards and won't start if you don't have the ones they require

 

[VedZ]

impguardman, don't worry about it.

I had been playing WoW on my onboard ATi Xpress 200 and on a PCI ATi 9200SE(really bad card, its PCI not express ).

So anyway, I wouldn't worry about that card not being able to run the game in medium settings with an average of 30. With my ATi 9200SE which lacked bandwidth(PCI) I was able to run it around 25ish fps. O btw, this was on a Celeron 2.5ghz with 768 ram. Not a good rig but it ran WoW in low/medium settings. My 9200SE used to score 4000 in 3DMark2001SE I am pretty sure that card can top that.

 

[baronvongogo]

WOW should run on a 7300LE not on high settings though. The power supply will be fine too 250W is enough for a 6200 so a 7300LE should be more efficient anyway and will be alright.

 

[Nitestick]

good point. the 7300 consumes less power than the 6200 because it is a very similar GPU with added features (that don't consume more power) and a decreased die process size (means less power consumption). that does effectively eliminate power as an issue. i say go back to basics and take the game to bare minimum settings which should be entirely playable. i do mean bare minimum. then work your way up from there in order of the features he wants by priority. for me if this is an LCD monitor my first priority would probably be getting it set to native resolution if possible, if not my first priority would be the texture detail for objects (not the environment if possible, it saps a lot of processing). take it from there and work up to a point where it is still playable and has the best graphical settings.

i still think the pc probably just needs some house keeping like a spyware scan, virus scan, defrag and so forth. also be sure to close any resource consuming programs like limewire and other P2P software. they can be a major burden on games because they starve them of both internet bandwidth and cpu cycles.