ITS MATHS TIEM!

Fastest x2 processor (6400+) http://www.ebay.com/itm/230856481233 $80
new QUALITY power supply http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16817703035 $65
4 sticks of ram http://www.ebay.com/itm120323363642 $40

All told $185. If passmark benchmarks can be believed, then the cpu is roughly rated at 1779 and the video @ 916

Looking at this combo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDeta … t=Combo.1050244 with a geforce 640 for $99

you are looking at a rating of ~6700 cpu/ 1250 gpu. While the gpu doesnt sound like much, you gain DX11 features. and skyrim will look (and play) like a WHOLE NEW GAME. This is also a "new" video card. for the same price you can get a used card with much more power, but prices change so fast its silly. The "resale" value of my 5870 is ~$100. ($150 if I sacrifice a goat on a volcano under a blue moon) It would run skyrim @ 1920x1200 max settings @ 30ish fps. To give you a frame of reference.

the i5-2500k is a fast/cheap little powerhouse. I got a benchmark for you with video encoding: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy- … -2100-tested/16

luckybob wrote:

afaik, anything that can be done in xp can be done in windows 7.

Pretty much, yeah. But it's little idiosyncracies which pop up between OSes when coding that makes you want to program for the most current system possible. :P

luckybob wrote:

If you went with a faster video card, the power supply will need and update too (i'm assuming you still have the original 250w thing installed)

I wanted a 550w to use the video card I got, since it needed 500w but I couldn't find any good 500s at the time, but the 550s were out of stock when it actually came time to make the purchase, so I ended up with a 650w. It BARELY fits in the case, but thankfully does. ^_^;

luckybob wrote:

naturally, you do what your budget will allow. I'm unemployed and I run out of benefits here soon. I fix and upgrade laptops on craigslist for people. Its not much because there are 100 other people doing it, but it gives me enough spending cash that I can afford an upgrade every 6 months or so. Case in point, I got lucky on ebay and I bought 32gb of ram for my computer and only paid $100. It took me 4 laptops to pay for that, but it was worth it.

I'm... not going to go into too many specifics about how I have so little spending cash, though what it comes down to is that people simply don't want to hire me for some reason, nor would it do anyone any good due to the sleeping problems I've had for over a decade, and my Dad only gives me the bare basics I need to survive, meaning everything else has to come from what little I make on ad revenue from ADG and software sales.

To that end, I'm REALLY hoping Vectorzone turns out to be even just a minor hit when it's done. 10,000 sales alone would cover me for four years of life expenses and just 200 sales would be enough to finally get a new computer!

sgt76 wrote:

is your power supply up to the job of handling a 9800GT?

It needs a 500w minimum and I have a 650w. It also needed a particular rating on the 12v line and the PSU I got fits the bill and then some. ;)

sgt76 wrote:

Lastly overclock everything

I've thought about upping the clock speed on my CPU, just for the simple fact that the thing runs so cold. (Never goes above 30-something-c.) GPU runs 50-ish during gameplay so that's hot enough. :P

luckybob wrote:

Fastest x2 processor (6400+)

Not supported by my motherboard. Installing it would be a gamble.

luckybob wrote:

Looking at this combo with a geforce 640 for $99

I... don't see a GeForce 640 anywhere on that page. You sure you got the link right?

Incidentally, I'm not ever buying another dual-core processor. As I said earlier, the vast majority of framerate issues related to the problem I've been running into seem to happen almost exclusively to dual-core users. Only a couple people had quad-cores.

The first thing that I tell people when money comes up as being an issue. Don't buy or rent music and movies, get rid of the cable TV service and then there after about three months there is usually between $200-300 on the table for upgrades.

Don't waste your money on a crappy GT640, it is terribly bottlenecked by the lack of memory bandwidth and Kepler in general isn't the best thing around. If you want and need to be thrifty then consider buying second hand. If your luck is good you can land a GTX460 for as little as $75! Look around for used boards with the cpu and ram already installed. AM3 and 1155 SB is plenty while competition shouldn't be to high.

some mainboard were equipped with technology to run the CPU cores at different speed/clocks (ie one core is either faster or slower than the other core).
it was claimed to conserve power usages, but it usualy being problem on XP.

I would recommend to disable it to allow all cores running at the same speeds.

Gemini000 wrote:

Then I noticed that all of the games I have these framerate problems with use texture streaming and my framerate problems always crop up when textures need to be loaded... and then it occurred to me... I may have a PCIe 2.0 video card, but my PCIe slot on my motherboard is 1.1... the slot itself only has half the bandwidth to and from the card compared to 2.0! 😳

PCIe 1.1 still does 250MB/s per lane, which on a x16 card would be ~4GB/s. To put that in perspective, you could dump your entire system RAM to the card twice per second, or fill the card's entire onboard memory 8 times per second.

nforce4max wrote:

The first thing that I tell people when money comes up as being an issue. Don't buy or rent music and movies, get rid of the cable TV service and then there after about three months there is usually between $200-300 on the table for upgrades.

I don't have cable TV, my telephone service is pretty standard, my internet is not only ADSL with no caps but dirt-cheap because I've had the same account for over a decade, and because I own my home I pay a mortgage instead of rent, which is FAR cheaper than typical rent prices in the city, especially considering I have a 3-bedroom townhouse and even something as tiny as a studio-apartment would actually cost more per month to rent. :O

To put it simply, you'll be hard pressed to find someone (who doesn't live in poverty) who's cost of living is as low as mine. Earlier I estimated 10,000 sales of my next game would pay my living expenses for 4 years. Well, that was just a guess. I did the math, and it would actually be more like 5. ;)

I think at this time, the best I can do is hope that Vectorzone sells well when it's ready to go so that I can give myself a serious upgrade instead of just baby steps.

so you're using an nforce board? I find the driver support for those chipsets very poor... go google fernando's nforce drivers... he "hacked" various nforced drivers together and optimized them to work better/support older chipsets.... I used them with my old socket 939 board because nvidia is gay and won't make any windows 7 drivers for it, and their vista drivers suck

I wouldn't bother with new nvidia video cards either... their drivers have been sucking a lot these past 2 years.... ATI's drivers work much better these days and the video quality is way better with ATI, performance is just about as good as nvidia or better in some cases..... I just don't remember when the last time I got nvidia drivers for my various systems that worked right... all of them had weird issues.... one of them actually made the system BSOD every few hours under heavy, non graphics load.... and yes, they were official WDM drivers, not some leaked, beta, or hacked bullshit.... ATI drivers? They just plain worked

its also a FIRST generation pci-e board. First generation ANYTHING tends to be buggier than a hooker with the sniffles. Remember pci when it first came out? USB? Windows 98?

First gen pci-e and nforce 4 boards work just fine. I've owned plenty over the years and they're some of the least buggy things I've ever worked on.

Suffice to say, it isn't the pci-e 1.1 bus or Nvidia chipset that's holding anything back or causing stuttering etc. They're both fine. They've done plenty of tests (google it please! 😒 ) showing that pci-e 1.1 doesn't even bottleneck high-end cards like the GTX580 etc.

The OP's issues are something else. Could be as simple as trying to run a game like Skyrim on a very poor system or as complex as a dying motherboard/ video card or badly installed drivers.

Too few details are provided for any meaningful diagnosis so we're all just poking around in the dark, really.

I dunno what other stats I could provide really. I already listed my basic system specs and said that games like Duke Nukem Forever and Skyrim run perfectly fine. :/

With Vectorzone progress finally kicking into high-gear the past couple days I'm starting to care less and less about this since I'm spending so much time coding stuff now... stuff that runs 60 FPS easily. :P

In fact, the tile-mapping engine I came up with runs SO well that once I get the next public alpha out, I'm gonna try it out on my really outdated system in the office, the one running Windows 98 with 512 MB of RAM and a GeForce FX 5200 card, just to see how well it runs on it... if it even will. ;D

I'd be tempted to image your current OS then fresh install with basic drivers and only the stuttering game in question. If the problem goes away continue your system setup, if it persists, look to some of the upgrade recommendations posted so far.

I run a Phenom II 555 BE [stock 3.2] @ almost 4.1 on air - you might try a moderate OC to see if bit more horsepower solves the stuttering..

When you go for another build and wonder about picking a huge case I found one at a local shop today that was cheap. Bought a Ultra U12-40670 for $48.71 after tax 😀

Next to my bed it is taller by about two inches xd

If you try to overclock your current comp the fist thing that is going to limit your clocks will be the ram and likely the board. When I had a similar system the ram really held me back but the board later on overclocked a Phenom 1 8250E to 2.7ghz after upgrading the ram.