Need SL computer upgrade advice

Hi there.

My PC runs SL fairly well, but I would like to make it run better if possible.

I don't have a gazillion dollars to spend, but I can afford to do a couple of upgrades (I hope).

Here are my specs for what I am currently running:

Pentium 4 3.06ghz HT.

Shuttle AB60R motherboard with Intel 865PE chipset, with a front side bus capable of 933mhz, can accomodate 4GB of DDR SDRAM, SATA compatible (though I have 3 normal hard drives and toshiba DVD/CD-RW player in it currently), is capable of accomodating up to a P4 3.2ghz HT processor, and has a 4x/8x AGP slot. No PCI Express slot.

1GB (two 512s in dual channel config) PC2100 DDR SDRAM installed.

nVidia geForce FX 5500 256MB AGP video card.

400w SATA ready power supply.

Windows XP Pro Enterprise edition.

Now, my questions are:

To get this thing running SL like a champ, should I:

Upgrade RAM and AGP video card?

Get a new PCI Express ready motherboard and PCI express card? If I chose this option, could I use my 1GB of pc2100 RAM I already own or would I need to upgrade?

I am financially limited to doing about two (maybe three) things - upgrading RAM and video card or upgrading motherboard and video card being the likely scenarios.

I prefer to stay with an nVidia card, I understand they are just better for SL and I am comfy with them because I have used them for a long time and not had problems except for a geforce 2 from PNY which they immediately replaced no problem, even got an upgrade out of that because they no longer stocked my card.

I will probably build a second machine form the leftovers if possible - I have a case with power supply, a P4 2.4ghz processor and an unused 256MB PC2100 stick of RAM, so please bear that in mind when making suggestions. A second PC would be nice because I am a huge multitasker.

A couple final questions:

Anyone have some advice on PCIE versus AGP?

and,

Are SATA drives worth it?

and lastly,

Is overclocking my P4 3.06 an option? (I saw someone mention overclocking on a website)

Thanks in advance for any and all help with this!

If I was you, I would wait until I could afford to sell it and buy a whole new system.

Upgrading parts is quite difficult these days. Motherboards, CPU and RAM formats change too often and are rarely compatible with older parts.

Some days I feel feel like throwing my computer in the bin and going and buying a games console.

I wish I could, but unfortunately I am a college student, living on my own, with limited financial means at the moment, so it's gonna be a couple years at least before I can buy a new system.

I don't mind finding compatible parts and doing a little research. I also find it entertaining and a learning process to get my hands "dirty" and do the actual upgrades myself. There's something fun about having all the guts out on the table and putting it back together and have it work properly.

If you can't afford the full deal, then I'd say look into getting a new vid card first. If you do tho, make sure to get one of the ones that have better cores, not gutted cores. 6800GT/GS or better, 7900 GT/GS or better, etc... is what i would be looking at. Dont fall for the low-end 7300 type cards cuz OMG it's got 512mb memory in it! Not worth it... this game runs fine on a 256mb vid card, as long as the core is fast enough.
Second upgrade would be memory, but not necessary. It'll help... some, but then again you might not notice it.

The system you have now is quite good. Replacing a single part/component wont really have much effect on that little FPS number. To get a noticable and worthwhile increase in performance you would have to upgrade your motherboard, CPU, videocard and RAM.

I feel like I'm being negative now.

Okay, I have an idea:

You could always consume some magical mushrooms, this may help to make your computer (and everything else) appear to run much faster.


Happy happy. Joy joy.

Since you seem to have a limited budget, upgrading RAM and the video card seems to be the best way to go. Go for at least a GeForce 6600GT, or a 7600GS if your budget will stretch that far. Either type of card will be a noticable change over that 5500. You could get by with the 1GB of RAM, but doubling it will really help. Shop carefully, and you can put off a major upgrade for at least a year for under $300.00 USD.

I'd also recommoned RAM and video card first, and if you can toss it in, then get a processor ASAP. From the looks of it, you have a good processor than can handle more, but won't be able to fully utilize the new parts.

www.newegg.com has package deals at REALLY cheap pricing and great customer service. I goofed up my components I bought on compatibility and they readily exchanged it within a week's time mailing there and back. They even paid for shipping back!

Teeny has the right idea for my opinion with the 7600, that's what I run in my gaming comp (but I upgraded from a 4000 series, can't remember now, the specific), and I thought I would um... get overly excited at the new graphics.

While I did a system overhaul, my FPS on SL boosted from an average of 10-20 now at 40-60. Me loves it!

If you love nVidia, stay with them. I'm personally a fan boi of them myself, so if you started with it, stick with it for the compatibility of all the other games out there.

I have a rather similar system, and recently upgraded my graphics card from a GeForce 5200FX 128mb to a NX6600 256mb. This helped a *lot* with SL performance, I get better framerates in most situations - I see 15-50fps where I used to see 5-10 before.

Upgrading the video card is certainly the way to go. I recently upgraded an older AGP system from a 5600XT to a 7600GS (about $110 final price), and my frame rate doubled even after turning on more eye candy. The only faster video card for AGP that I know of is the 7800GS, but that would run $250-300, more than I would advise spending on an upgrade of an AGP system. (The faster GT versions of those cards aren't available for the AGP bus.)

The older 6800, if you can still find one, might or might not be faster than the 7600; I haven't had the opportunity to test them side-by-side. But it won't have the latest version of shader support, which might hurt in future versions of Second Life, and will certainly hurt if you plan to run other high-end games or upgrade to Vista.

1GB of RAM is probably enough. But you can tell for yourself by watching the hard disk light on your computer (if you have one) while you run SL. Once SL initially loads, you should see only an occasional flicker of hard disk activity as SL reads and writes the disk cache); if you see a steady stream of disk activity, you don't have enough RAM. The RAM demands of SL vary depending on where you are, so test this in the busiest place you normally go. BTW, that slow PC2100 is probably costing you a bit of performance; low-latency PC3200 RAM would likely gain you 10% or so (and to get that, you would have to remove all the old RAM and replace it with new), but that's not enough of a gain to justify the expense.

A processor upgrade won't help your SL performance much; you've already got a reasonably fast one. Putting in a dual-core Pentium D, if your motherboard supports it (check CURRENT info on the Shuttle web site, not the info that came with the motherboard when you bought it; processor support often gets updated), would make your system run more smoothly if you want to run other applications at the same time as Second Life... but then you would need more RAM as well. By the time you've done all of that, you've probably put too much money into an older system; better to sell it and invest in a new Core Duo 2 system.

If you start looking at a more serious upgrade path, you could certainly consider going to a PCI Express-capable motherboard. Alas, your RAM would not be compatible with most of them; the world has moved to DDR2 memory. You could do a partial upgrade now (new motherboard, DDR2 memory, and video card) and put off the new CPU until later -- just make sure to get a motherboard that will work with a Core Duo 2 as well as with your old Pentium 4. But you'd still be looking at spending $500 immediately (since I would advise buying 2GB of RAM in the form of two 1GB sticks if you were going to do this; using a system with two 512MB sticks is fine, but I wouldn't BUY them now), and it sounds as though that is outside your budget.

Get a video card upgrade. The GeForce 5500 you have is the low-end of the three-generations ago line of NVIDIA cards introduced in 2003. 5200, 5300, 5400, and 5500 are all respins of the same NV34 chip, the low-end of the NV3x generation.

The GeForce 7600 is a solid performer, excellent bang-for-the-buck, but since the GeForce 8x00 series is launching only days away, on November 8th, you may want to hold off to see if the price of a significantly better 7800 or even 79x0 comes down into your price range.

Upgrading from 1GB to 2GB did nothing significant to my Second Life performance. However, upgrading your PC2100 to PC3200 (or higher) may change your experience. Check out the 'front end bus speed' of your motherboard-processor combination for the max RAM speed that will make a difference.

Uh, Shuttle boards...

Most of the time when I am tuning a system I try to keep the various bits, and see how quick they go in another machine. I have repeatedly been flat-out astounded by the difference between motherboards, especially between Intel chipsets and the rest.

Before you go nuts on more video horsepower, just see if you can get an Abit or Supermicro motheroboard in a full-size case which will take all your various parts. Make sure you're getting an Intel (or, at a stretch, the NVidia motherboard) chipset, and test the system with the lid off so you can disable some unused peripherals (serial ports, parallel ports etc) and move sound and network cards from PC slot to PC Slot.

Eventually you'll hit a setup with goes about five times faster than you thought was possible, and by changing the last things you'd have thought of - the case and the mobo!

Keeping in mind you don't have cash for a new machine here is my suggestion list:
1. Video Card 2. RAM 3. Overclock everything as best you can.

That is assuming that you are combating low frame rates rather than lag due to swapping data on and off the hard drive. If you hard drive is going nuts all the time and that is why it is slow then RAM would be the top of my list.

Another consideration is what resolution you are running SL in. I run my main home monitor in 1600x1200 and run SL usually in a large window consuming most of the screen space. That resolution (probably 1450x1100 normally) on my main monitor puts a serious hurt on my frame rate. If I decrease the window size so it is closer to 1024x768 (or put it in full-sceren mode) things run significantly better.

My single greatest bang for the buck in making SL run better was a video card upgrade on my machine. I have a ATI X800 in my Desktop PC as my primary and used to have a 9600 and that about doubled my frame rate and let me turn on all the video features.

My machine is a non-HT 2.8ghz P4, if you want to multitask (I always run SL in a window) another suggestion for non-HT/dual core machines is to set SL at "below normal" priority from task manager, that makes the rest of the machine run much better and doesn't seem to have much of an affect on SL.

Regarding RAM it will commonly consume 500+MB of RAM on my machine. I've heard other people say it will exceed 700MB but I've never witnessed it myself.

As for AGP or PCI-X, I wouldn't upgrade just for a PCI-X slot if you are still keeping the rest of your hardware (CPU/Memory). If you are ready to make the leap I would upgrade to a PCI-X motherboard not just for the video slot but for all the rest of the features new motherboards have such as higher RAM speed support and a significantly faster data bus, but those features would also require a new processor and RAM.

For comparison, I also own a Macbook Pro, the RAM is 667mhz and it's running a Core Duo at 2.16ghz w/ a ATI X1600 256MB of RAM. It kills all the other computers in our house. I rarely see my framerate drop below 20FPS and usually it runs in the 30s unless I'm lagging due to downloading/texture caching occurring. My main desktop on the other hand runs at 10-20FPS average when I've got the window at a rough equivelent resolution to my Mac.

As for overclocking, that is always and option but does come with some (fairly minor in my experience) risks. You might end up cooking your processor or killing your video card/etc. but for me it has always been worth at least tweaking the speeds up a little bit. My current machine doesn't tolerate overclocking very well (10% or so) but I've had other machines in the past that you could push quite a bit harder than default without negative issues. I don't know about how it works for the Nvidia cards but for ATI cards there are automatic overclocking utilities that will determine the best GPU/Memory rate for you automatically (they crank the speed up slowly, testing occasionally to see if the card starts producing artifacts).

-Alan

Is that running OSX or XP?

It's quite a vote for "don't fool around with what the smart guys make" if that's true. From what I have seen of Overclocking, the big problem is that people try that first, when in fact they should be shopping around ont he machine, looking for the source of the slowdowns. I have 1-ish GHz Athlons that will do a good framerate here - in their case the trick was to use the onboard ATA RAID for the system drive, and keep the add-on ethernet out of the slot which some goofball had decided would share the interrupt with the RAID chips...