[rumble291]

Hi, I was wondering what to upgrade?. I want to play CS:S at about 100fps. My system specs below

CPU: AMD Athlon XP 2400
Motherboard: ASRock K7S8X R3.0
RAM: 1GB Crucial PC3200
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon X700 Pro 256MB
hard drives: 60GB Elcostar 7200rpm, 20GB Quantuim Fireball 5400rpm
PSU: Ebuyer extra value 500W Casecom
CD/DVD drives: LiteOn DVD dual layer writer, Samsung CD drive

Thanks,

Kurt

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Everything except the ram its allright, the rest could be better.

Also 100fps on CSS means jack i can have 200 but i dont i have 65 because its at max settings it proves nothing saying fps in a game at all without at least some sort of qualification to it.

[warriorscot]

Everything except the ram its allright, the rest could be better.

Also 100fps on CSS means jack i can have 200 but i dont i have 65 because its at max settings it proves nothing saying fps in a game at all without at least some sort of qualification to it.

[Neil Jones]

Hi, I was wondering what to upgrade?. I want to play CS:S at about 100fps.

Why? Your eyes won't be able to see anything faster than 25fps anyway so there comes a cut-off point where you can get the fps up but you won't actually notice it. As long as the system is able to give you a constant frame rate of anything above, say, 40fps on your preferred graphics settings, you're okay.

Your system specs date from about three years ago now, I have similiar specs (see profile). This is Socket A technology so it essentially sucks compared to what you can get today. You can change the board and processor to a new generation 939 and if you shop around a bit, one can get them both for about £200 at this time, or you can go for cheaper upgrade route of about £70 for a socket 754 board with a Sempron 2800 processor and take the rest of your stuff with you over to it.

But having said that, and that you want 100fps as it is, what sort of frame rate are you getting now?

Edited by Neil Jones, 04 June 2006 - 12:16 PM.

[rumble291]

Im currently getting around 30-40 but can drop as low as 11. Oh btw military testing has proved ur eyes can see up to 200 fps lol i read on some site. Are SATA2 hard drives better for gaming?

[warriorscot]

Military can think what they want but biology wins out the human eye refreshes the image sent to the brain every 23-24th of a second you cant see more than 200 thats bull your television for example when was the last time you saw that stutter its at a constant 24 FPS. If someone came out with scientific evidence of the human eye refreshing at over 4 times the currently accepted rate then it would be pretty big news and given i follow alot of scientific developments i probably woulda heard about it in new scientist or one of the other news channels fro scientists.

SATA2 hard drives are faster than say ATA drives which you probably have and given that your drives look incredibly old then performance boost would be pretty good.

I would stick your money in the bank and wait a bit and save some more cash your system would be hard to upgrade your not gonna get any upgrades without a new mobo and for a good mobo that means a new CPU at least and preferably a new gfx card only thing even moderatley salvagable is the RAM and even at that DDR2 is really coming in now so you wouldnt really want to keep it.

Also i wouldnt want to keep that PSU its playing with fire on one of those things.

[rumble291]

Ok, atm all i want my pc to do is play CS:S at a higher frame rate. What would you suggest to upgrade? I dont want upgrade everything just yet.

Thanks,

Kurt

[warriorscot]

There isnt alot you could get a new gfx card but you would have it limited by the CPU which isnt that fast. You have a difficult to upgrade system you cant upgrade one thing without shooting yourself in the foot with another.

You could maybe get a faster CPU but fast socket As are like gold dust, you could maybe try a 754 socket upgrade but you arent going to be hugely better off unless you spend more than your £200, and then youve got an unsuitable PSU which i wouldnt be happy keeping if you upgraded to something needing more power.

The only thing that you could safely do is get a new HDD which would boost your performance is you got a good SATA2 and your mobo supports that or you got a seperate SATA card for it, but like i said difficult to upgrade withing £200 as you cant afford new gfx AND a new CPU and really you wouldnt be as well of doing one without the other. And you will need a new PSU as ebuyer PSUs are bottom of the barrel stuff.

[rumble291]

For £250 i can get AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice OEM, Arctic cooling Silencer, Asus A8V, Hiper triple fan 525W, Maxtor 80 GB SATA2. Would this be a worthy upgrade?

Thanks,

Kurt

[warriorscot]

Drop the A8v and it would be fine pretty good price, try and get a bigger HDD they cost more per Gb under200-300GB. Also what Hiper PSU is that because i havent seen a triple fan model in a while they have been making single 120mm models for about 2 years pretty exculsivley. You will need an HSF for the CPU as well.

Edited by warriorscot, 05 June 2006 - 01:17 PM.

[rumble291]

The PSU model number is HPU-4S525. I dont really need a bigger HDD though i only want the speed also i am already over budget. Whats HSF?
and also CS:S seems to crash randomly any ideas why that could be?

Thanks,

Kurt

[rumble291]

Ok ebuyer have gone and took the motherboard away so now they dont have any good AGP motherboards. Im going to go with microdirect. So this is what i thought would be in my proce range: Antec Turepower 2.0 480W, AMD Athlon 64 3500+, MSI K8T NEO2-F V2, 2 SATA2 Maxtor DimondMax Plus 10 8mb Cache. Wolud that be a worthy upgrade?

Thanks,

Kurt

[HaraldR]

seems ok to me

[warriorscot]

Its not a cery good mobo chipset its one of the least used chipsets, have you checked out gigabyte boards or Abit they are often cheap as well as having the good quality MSI can sometimes be expensive, not all the time but some.

Why are you getting 2HDD one is cheaper.

[rumble291]

Ok. All the AGP boards ive looked at only have a SATA-150 but the Asrock 939 DUAL-SATA2 has SATA-300. Its apparently an alright motherboard. I was gonna get 2 HDDs, 1 for games and the other for windows and programs etc but now I think i'll just get a high capcity drive cause the ASRock only has 1 SATA2 port because of the chipset limitations.

Edited by rumble291, 10 June 2006 - 03:45 AM.

[warriorscot]

you are better off with everything on one drive, cheaper as well, just have a seperate partition for data.