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[Biff Hardbody]

Hi All. A friend of mine is running an Athlon 64 3000 with a gig of Kingston value ram and a Radeon 9800XT 256 mb. What would be the best thing for him to upgrade? I'm sure he does not want to upgrade the processor, so right now its really between ram and graphics card. I'm not sure how much of an upgrade another gig of value ram would do for him, or if he should consider upgrading his XT.

His main concern is making games like World Of Warcraft run faster. If you were him, would you buy the extra gig of ram or upgrade the card? Thanks for your time.

 

[Neo_ZX]

That's a pretty solid system. Anything you do would only marginally improve things. Video card would probably help the most.

 

[fart]

have him kill his swap file. i really don't see why he needs to change out any hardware.

 

[AntoneM]

In order to get any truly meaningful performance gain he'd probably have to scrap the whole system and re-build. He already has a solid system it should handle WoW without a problem.

 

[Biff Hardbody]

Yeah, he says it handles it well but he gets dissapointed by the frame rate drops into the teens sometimes. He just wanted to see if there is anything he could buy that would stop that from happening.

 

[oxrock]

well, he could go nutty with a better graphics card, but what he has should play it pretty well. Has he tried defragging?

 

[Biff Hardbody]

Yeah, I had him defrag and reinstall his drivers with Driver cleaner. I suppose he'll want to wait for the next big graphics card as most card out now wouldn't warrant such a big buy for whatever performance they would do. I'm not even sure how much more performance a GT/X800 would give him.

 

[jedimike]

He doesn't need to upgrade... if he wants a significant boost, he would need a new board with a new PCI Express video card and DDR2 memory. If he doesn't want to do all that than the best he can do is maximize his swap file (2.5 X amount of memory), upgrade all drivers and firmware, and kill all unnecessary TSR's.

 

[Vormund]

I have a similar machine but with 1 gig extra low latency ram and an X800pro

I'd suggest probably video card, and checking out some sites on how to optimize windowsXP.

Maybe get some raid happening if he's feeling adventurous.

 

[Drexon]

Anyone know if Halo PC is just programmed by turds or if my AMD64 3000+, 1024 Kingston, R9800Pro 128 is supposed to have framedrops on the smaller more clutted maps?

 

[Vormund]

It's crappily ported.