Help needed. Where is my bottleneck

[huntero]

Hi, this is my first post so please bear with me.

my system is

AMD Athlon64 3200xp
Gigabyte K8NS (I think) nforce3
1GB Geil DDR400 cas 2.5
ATI X800XT 256MB AGP
Maxtor diamondmax 9 160gb
seagate barracuda 80gb
Antec Trueblue 600w PSU
2 dvd drives

my problem is .. games dont seem to be running as they should with my hardware. I play BF2 mostly and Im getting low framerates in action areas down to about 15fps with really bad stuttering as well. I run it in 1280x1024 on all medium settings. My pings are always low so that isnt the problem. Im just a bit stuck as to what to upgrade next to get the best performance boost.

any ideas?

 

[Sharkfood]

Get another gig of ram for BF2.

It's a total stutter and swap fest playing online with 512mb-1 gig at even medium/high settings as it's a total pig on memory.

Adding another 512 or 1 gig should cure your stutter, pauses and performance issues.

I play the game @ 1280x1024 on an X800XT, 3.0ghz P4 and at 1 gig, it was brutal. I can now play it with ALL video settings on "High" (except lighting at medium as a personal preference) @ 1280x1024 with great framerates just by adding another gig. Level loads are much better too.. and when you first join a server, it's not a jerky mess for 2-3 minutes still swapping junk to the swapfile- instant smoothness on-join.

 

[huntero]

thanks

thanks for the suggestion.. I thought ram might be an issue... that was going to be next on my list after a new CPU...
I was thinking about getting an 64bit 3800xp, they are dirt cheap atm . would i see nmuch of a perfoprmance increase from the 3200?

 

[paulrush81]

I've got a similar fairly high spec pc too and play bf2 and found exactly the same problem. Upped to 2 gig and it was better but reducing certain graphics settings helped the most. i thought this was bad but when i played on a friends system of lower spec his graphics were far worse, even though his settings were all medium