dell computor upgrade

[swkster]

I recently did a major up grade to my system.

Dell Diminison xps r
384 meg. ram

upgrades

Windows 98se to Windows xp Home

original IBM HD 14,4 G to a Western Digital HD 80 G

Gforce2 440 MX 64M to a Gforce3 TI200 128M

Turtle Beach Montego I to Creative Audigy2

MY machine was originally a PII 450 but I upgraded that to a PIII 1Gig.The processor upgrade was not part of this upgrade. The processor was changed out about a year ago.

My question is even though every thing looks and sounds better I am seeing little or no performance improvement in my games like Nascar racing 2002, or nascar Heat frame rates are about the same. Dose anybody have any idea what is going on. I would think that the video card upgrade alone would make my frame rates jump up.

P.S. I did go online and get all the latest drivers and updates for Windows XP.

Thanks, Swkster

 

[iss]

your biggest problem(s) are dog slow PC133 ram and a 133mhz system bus. an even faster card would not improve your game performance much because of those two bottlenecks.

 

[Vehementi]

Your system's weak point is the video card, still.

That wasn't a very big upgrade in terms of speed. You went from a low-end GF2 to a low-end GF3. Not that good at all. Frame rates SHOULD go up but not very much.

 

[olefarte]

I can agree with both iss and Veh. I once bought a computer that had a P4 1.7 (2.0 was tops at the time. All I had enough sense to know was, man, 1.7 must be fast. I soon after bought a $400 Ti4600(had a TNT 2). This gave me a much better gaming experence. But after running 3DMark 01, I saw that I had about 7200 points compared to most people getting 10,000 or more with the same processor. Now that I am so much smarter (that was a joke) I know that I had PC133 and that was what held my score down. While I really don't look at 3D Mark scores much, when you have this much difference, there's got to be some reason. Games still played pretty good though.

So, PC133 is a serious bottleneck but a better video card might have been better.

 

[swkster]

Thanks guys Ill ck it out. Ill bet your right , what I really need is a new computer.

Swkster

 

[Arris]

Originally posted by Vehementi
Your system's weak point is the video card, still.

That wasn't a very big upgrade in terms of speed. You went from a low-end GF2 to a low-end GF3. Not that good at all. Frame rates SHOULD go up but not very much.

Still the low end GF3 should probably clock to standard GF3 or above speeds without problem. The actual technological advancement from a GF2MX to GF3 is reasonably big with pixel shaders and vertex shaders coming into play.

Still the PC133 memory is the biggest bottle neck on your system now, but if its a 128mb card then it shouldn't need to use the system memory all that often. When you changed cards did you uninstall the detonator drivers then switch? I've had problems before when I have switched video cards and reinstalled drivers. Another thing to try is reinstalling the game. Its amazing how some games seem to lock to certain levels of performance inline with the hardware that they were originally installed with. I'd try that before writing off your system and doing any further upgrades

 

[Th3M1ghtyD8]

Just a small point, but is VSYNC disabled, otherwise you may not notice a difference in frame rates. Most versions of detonator drivers set VSYNC to on, to prevent video tearing, but most of the time it can be turned off. My Tweaking Program, or tweakers such as RivaTuner van do this.

 

[swkster]

Thanks for the ideas. yes v-sync is turned off in the normal driver settings, but I will try a program like riva tuner to make sure.

I just loaded Windows XP on a new harddrive so there was no old drivers on the system, BUT when it booted up the first time it automaticly loaded some drivers from Windows xp. I cant seem to stop it from loading these drivers when I unstall and reboot, so I can get a fresh install of new drivers. I dont know if this is my problem.

Swktser

 

[Rick]

What you upgraded in memory is probably being used by Windows XP right now. hehe!

Windows XP really does run faster than 98/Me from what I've experienced.. Just keep it fat and happy with plenty of memory and it will treat you well.

For general usage (not gaming usually), you should see a nice increase in performance from the new hard drive alone.

Gaming depends largely upon video card and CPU, which you did not upgrade a whole lot. Memory will help, but it only unleashes the "potential" speed of your system.. So won't run faster, it will just run as fast as it can for longer.

But that HDD should speed up your system's interface, loading and general feel nicely.. really.