Need for speed

[fw2004]

Hello;
I've got a 4yr old Asus P5AD2-E Premium with P4 hyper-threading (not extreme) 3.4Ghz, 3GB DDR2 533Mhz, BFG GeForce 6800 w 256MB on PCI Express and RAID0 Hdd system.

I'm trying to get faster game playing (Trainz RR simulator 2009).
I am not sure what my bottleneck is, but on testing with PassMark performance test I see max frame rates in full screen mode of about 39hz.

I tried over-clocking the board, and all I can do without having stability issues is 10%, which doesn't do squat for performance.

I'm now thinking that upgrading RAM to 4G (board max), and going with PC-8500 instead of PC-5300, maybe if I use the faster RAM I can get more Overclocking?

I can also upgrade video, but it seems that my game is "stumbling" from time to time not due to frame rates, but due to HDD access. Therefore, I'm thinking that with more RAM, the game will not have to access the HDD so often and performance will be better.
Also, if I can OC the board by 20%, maybe I'll start to notice some improvement?

Or, am I barking up the wrong tree, when I really need a total upgrade.
Memory is really cheap now, but then, so are video cards.
I can get a much better one for about the same as what I would pay to upgrade to 4GB of DDR2-8500 RAM.

What do you think my best option is if I have about $100 to spend?

Thanks

FW

 

[AdriMagnon]

Hi,

it seems that my game is "stumbling" from time to time not due to frame rates, but due to HDD access.

I assume that the game loads all necessary data to your RAM before the level loads.

Maybe a service or program is starting to run while in the background. You can try turning off all unnecessary processes (such as printspooler) before you start your game and see if that helps.

Also, you can go in your game setting and turn down video detail and go from there. It also could be too much RAM is taken up and so virtual memory is being used. You'd have to run your game and then after a "stutter" switch over to process explorer to see what is going on.

Good Luck,

Adrian