New Processor Upgrade?

Bond007ukBond007uk
edited May 2004 in Hardware
have recently been doing some upgrading of my system, i have bought a new motherboard (see sig) and a new graphics card (9800XT) However i havn't upgraded my CPU yet and it is a P4 2.4Ghz (533fsb) and doesn't have Hyperthreading.

What i was considering is either a 2.8Ghz (800FSB with HT) or the 3.06Ghz model.

The problem is that dispite this 'beast' of a graphics card my Far Cry Game suffers from poor frame rates in places. (playing in 1024x768 ) Using a program called FRAPS to see the fps in games, in areas where there are a lot of shadows and lighting the game goes down to 25fps and in other areas it can run at 80fps!

Have installed Motherboard drivers and using Cats 4.4

So would a new processor upgrade solve my frame rate issues? Is this older P4 bottlenecking my system? Does Memory Type affect fps performance as i have 1gb of PC2700 (ddr333) ram which is in single channel as my mobo is not dual chanel. There no jumpiness or disk thrashing going on so i have lots of ram to run this game.

P4 2.4Ghz, Gigabyte GA-81848E-L, 1Gb PC2700 DDR, 80Gb WD HDD, MSI 52x CDRW, NEC

Comments

  • mmonninmmonnin Centreville, VA
    edited May 2004
    Well unless you want to get some new RAM the 3.06 is the highest you can get with that RAM.
  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited May 2004
    I never owned a P4 rig using a single channel controller, just have 2 DC boards myself. If you are going to buy a proc, I would get a 800 fsb Northwood and an i865 or i875 board such as the Abit IS7 or IC7. You can still use your present memory on those boards by running the memory at a 6:5 ratio, leaving the memory at PC2700 speeds while running a 200 fsb on the proc. If you want to overclock the proc, you can also select 3:2 for the memory so that it will still run with no errors while running a fsb speed faster than 200 while oc'ing the proc. Also, all 800 fsb Northwoods have hyperthreading.
  • DogSoldierDogSoldier The heart of radical Amish country..
    edited May 2004
    I'm not sure how much a difference a new processor would make, although a i875 + 2.8c would be a sweet upgrade. I have a 2.4 @ 3.15Ghz and a 9800 Pro, even with this machine I still have to turn down some of the eye candy in Far Cry.. because the game slows down in areas (Like you) of heavy shadows and lighting. My solution was to set my video options to medium.
  • Straight_ManStraight_Man Geeky, in my own way Naples, FL Icrontian
    edited May 2004
    CPU update will help some, faster RAM will help some, both together shuold solve problem. Here, I run DDR400 RAM and a 2.8 EE on an IC7-Max3 motherboard. The other box has a Northwood 2.8 512 L2 cache non HT on it, and DDR400 RAM. Same model motherboard, down to rev and BIOS version on it.

    What you will run into with a game, though, is that the action will mostly all run through ONE pipe of your HT CPU. So, speed would be more important for asingle game than HT or non-HT unless the game actually does a lot of threading itself. I use RAM at DDR400 as that balance seems to work well. It is twice base CPU rate of about 200 (CPU is OC'd on both boxes, RAM is OC'd on the Northwood box also), and is half the rate of the CPU quad-pumped rate. On the Prescott box, I run RAM at 1:1 and on the Northwood I run at CPU 4 and RAM 5 as what the RAM is is DDR333 VS Corsair 2.5CAS that is OC'd to DDR400, one stick in each Dual Channel bank. Normally both sticks ARE in use. BIOS has it speed set at 2.5,3,3,7 and it never was intended as Dual Channel. Why it works is this, VS come matched pairs, tested for speed matching. So, both DO run at same rates. IF you have different brands, or speeds of RAM, one in each channel bank, this will not at all work.

    The problem is HT wants dual channel to work right, so if you do not have a dual channel motherboard, then the HT will be as slow as molasses compared to abord with DUAL CHANNEL physical RAM.

    On the Prescott box, I am running DDR400 Corsair LLPT (low latency Platinum Heatsink) at 2.5,3,3,7 in dual channel config, one stick each per bank. AT LOW LATENCY, not relaxed JEDEC Latency. AGAIN(what follows is REAL important), matched pair for speed tested by Corsair on an Athlon FX or Opteron box before Corsair shipped it to the dealer I got it from. Two different speed sticks will not work this way-- period, you will memory I\O collisions with dual channel from two unmatched speed sticks. NEEDS to be matched speed pair, and good grade of RAM to very good grade. The faster the base CPU and lower the multiplier, the more RAM in both banks of a dual channel has to match, and amount of RAM in each of the dual channel channels has to match also. Dual channel is incredibly timing sensitive, but you do not necessarily have to get Dual Channel RAM if you use DDR400 and it is matched speed. For above DDR400 with RAM I WOULD definitely use Dual Channel, RAM timing changes of tinier kinds get more and more likely to make for a prograessive mess and is more likely to crash.
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