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Processor: AMD Athlon64 3000+ (2GHz)

Videocard: Geforce 6600GT AGP

(and before you ask, yes I have plenty of RAM)

Both of those compliment eachother very nicely, so I'd say you have no bottleneck worthy of mentioning right now. If you're asking which to upgrade, though, I'd say upgrade the graphics first.

Likely the GPU.

Graphics card is definitely the bottleneck. You'll almost certainly see a bigger improvement with a better graphics card than with a better CPU.

What type of;

• motherboard
• chipset
• harddrive(7200rpm or something slower?, whats the seek time?)?
  
• OS.
  
• Service packs

Any issues with your current setup? What types of games are having prefomance issues, how are these presenting themselves(stuttering, long load times, etc).

The CPU & GPU are not the sole cause of, lack of, gaming preformance.

The only thing the hard drive should impact is level load times. (If it's impacting framerates, you need more RAM.)

Motherboard/chipset can have some effect, but it's not going to be nearly as significant as the CPU and vid card.

Similarly, I've never seen OS and service packs making a major difference in framerates... unless you're running an old Pentium clunking along at 200MHz with 32MB of RAM, in which case Windows 95 might well provide better performance than Windows 98.

ggs wrote:
What types of games are having prefomance issues, how are these presenting themselves(stuttering, long load times, etc).

mostly issues with First Person Shooter games (FEAR, BF2). Sporadic drops in fps during play.

I'm certain the bottleneck is between CPU or GPU. All the rest should be pretty top notch

Uraniun235 wrote:Similarly, I've never seen OS and service packs making a major difference in framerates...

Thats only if nothing is wrong or miss-configured. Ideally if everything is working properly it just gets out of the fucking way and you get onto gaming.

Otherwise you get can get types of wierd and horrifying preformance issues. Harddrive in PIO mode for example, it doesnt take much disk IO to seriously hammer the CPU.

wautd wrote:mostly issues with First Person Shooter games (FEAR, BF2). Sporadic drops in fps during play.

You cant play FEAR without sporadic drops in fps on even the highest end of gaming rigs. And BF2 is just as bad.

FEAR on the highest settings will still get fps drops even with at least 2gb of ram, SLI 7800gtx 512mb, and a Athlon64 4400+.

I'm not sure this is a good time to upgrade, actually. The current crop of video cards don't support DX10 or HDCP, and it sounds like chip manufacturers are finally going to some decently faster procs starting later this year, breaking the relative stagnation of the last 2 or so years.

My system is basically the same as yours, but with a 9800 Pro instead of a 6600 GT, and I don't plan to upgrade until Christmas. Then again, I don't play FEAR or BF2.

ggs wrote:Otherwise you get can get types of wierd and horrifying preformance issues. Harddrive in PIO mode for example, it doesnt take much disk IO to seriously hammer the CPU.

Yeah, but the OS and the service pack number generally aren't going to indicate that sort of issue.

I get fps drops all the time in FEAR and Doom3 (but not BF2) with this setup:

Athlon64 X2 4200+
2GB Cas2 mem
7800GT OC

Of course, part of the reason is that I run at 1280x1024 (LCD) with nearly full quality (High quality in Doom3 /w everything maxed).

The terrible fact is that a 6600GT and a 3000+ aren't cut out to play current games at full spec (To be fair, I don't think any card really is, even SLI setups in some cases). However, unless it's really important to you to have everything running at high qualities _right now_, I would *not* dump money into your current rig. You don't have PCI Express, and AMD is phasing out all of its current processors in favor of processors designed for their new AM2 socket (along with DDR2 ram). Your hardware is obsolete (sucks doan it?). You're best off waiting until those motherboards are available and upgrading everything (if you have the cash). Otherwise you are putting good money into already obsolete hardware.

Miles Teg

Edit: One thing that wouldn't be a bad idea to upgrade is your RAM. It's relatively cheap. If you have less than a gig, that's an option that makes sense. It might even make sence to go above a gig.

To be fair a 3000+ Athlon64 and a 6600GT should do fine in Battlefield 2 anyway barring any problems. I used to play it in 1024x768 resolution, on all-medium settings, with 4x antialiasing on a system almost identical to that and didn't get much slowdown (some, but you have to expect some in Battlefield 2 at some point.)

Been nosing around a bit. The XTX Geforce 7800 GS seems to be a nice upgrade without the need to change my current mobo

wautd wrote:Been nosing around a bit. The XTX Geforce 7800 GS seems to be a nice upgrade without the need to change my current mobo

Are you sure? I was not aware that there are 7800xx cards that are AGP.

It's all about what you're willing to settle with, really. I can rarely tell the difference between medium-high and max settings, so I don't stress over not being able to crank them. So I don't intend to upgrade unless I can't play the newest games at 1280 x 960 with medium settings. Other people either can tell the difference, or just like the satisfaction of knowing that they're experiencing a game at its best possible quality, and I don't begrudge them for that. But I will say that anyone who upgrades now is going to have to upgrade again when they want to play a DirectX 10 game, or when they want to watch a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD on their computer. They would also get a motherboard chipset that's about to be phased out. To me, it just doesn't make sense to upgrade now.

Ace Pace wrote:

wautd wrote:Been nosing around a bit. The XTX Geforce 7800 GS seems to be a nice upgrade without the need to change my current mobo

Are you sure? I was not aware that there are 7800xx cards that are AGP.

You are now.

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:I'm not sure this is a good time to upgrade, actually. The current crop of video cards don't support DX10 or HDCP, and it sounds like chip manufacturers are finally going to some decently faster procs starting later this year, breaking the relative stagnation of the last 2 or so years.

Yeah... I'm thinking of waiting a couple of months as well actually and do a full upgrade by then

wautd wrote:Been nosing around a bit. The XTX Geforce 7800 GS seems to be a nice upgrade without the need to change my current mobo

Be aware that the 7800 GS is significantly slower than the 7800 GT.

And, considering that the cheapest 7800GS I can find on Newegg is $299, and that there's a really sweet deal on a 7800GT plus motherboard for only $349 (a decent motherboard for $50 is a really good deal!), you're really better suited getting the GT+mobo combo.