Should i upgrade?

son-of-plunder

Evening all,

Currently i have a nvidia 8800gts 512mb gfx card and im running xp. Thinking of upgrading to windows 7 after Xmas but im curious is there any point upgrading the gfx card or will i soldier on with what i have. Ive a 20" monitor running at 1600x900. Mainly use the computer for games and ive no major trouble fps wise, just in places on some games but im thinkin driver upgrade might solve that.

Cheers,
Paul

lmimmfn

completely depends on your expectations. An 8800GTS( 512Mb ) card should handle most games without AA and on high settings at your resolution. So are you wanting to up the settings? if its a problem of slowdown what is your cpu and ram?

son-of-plunder

lmimmfn wrote: »

completely depends on your expectations. An 8800GTS( 512Mb ) card should handle most games without AA and on high settings at your resolution. So are you wanting to up the settings? if its a problem of slowdown what is your cpu and ram?

Intel Q6600 @ stock speeds and 4gb OCZ DDR2 ram on xp 32bit. Most games run fine but certain parts of levels can lock up for 30secs or so and its grand again. Just curious is it worthwhile upgrading at the moment or should i save the pennies for longer?

ronkmonster

son-of-plunder wrote: »

Intel Q6600 @ stock speeds and 4gb OCZ DDR2 ram on xp 32bit. Most games run fine but certain parts of levels can lock up for 30secs or so and its grand again. Just curious is it worthwhile upgrading at the moment or should i save the pennies for longer?

Have you cleaned the fans since you got it? If it plays grand most of the time, those pauses might be overheating.

Only upgrade if new games are getting too slow for you. Never a right time to upgrade otherwise. Always something new coming in a few months. Ati have just released new mid range cards if dx 11 interests you and want something a bit future proofed.

lmimmfn

son-of-plunder wrote: »

Intel Q6600 @ stock speeds and 4gb OCZ DDR2 ram on xp 32bit. Most games run fine but certain parts of levels can lock up for 30secs or so and its grand again. Just curious is it worthwhile upgrading at the moment or should i save the pennies for longer?

if i were you i would get an nvidia 260 or ATI 4870/4890 second hand and balance your system or a 5770/nvidia 460 768Meg new, your cpu is quite good( by PC gaming standards ) and your mem is good but your gfx card is old( relatively ).

Locking up for 30 seconds its nothing to do with your gfx power, either you have too much crap running in the background while gaming causing pageing( confirm this if you alt + tab in a game, is there a large delay of 10 seconds+? ), or you have crappy virus checkers kicking in killing performance, or you actually have a virus

son-of-plunder

Thanks for your help. Ill clean the fans and try and upgrade the drivers and see if that helps, im not sure if i can upgrade drivers tho as my file permissions are a bit all over the shop after i messed around with win7 (downloaded from certain sites) but changed my mind and went back to xp, had to create a new user profile. Is there a right and wrong way of updating drivers?

Solitaire

Right way is generally to atom-bomb the existing ones with a driver cleaning utility before you try to install any new ones.

son-of-plunder

Could you reccomend a good free driver cleaning utility? Joys of being a broke student :P

PogMoThoin

Driver sweeper

Run driver sweeper in safe mode after uninstalling the old driver

Overheal

Drive sweeper is nice and friendly.

On the 8800 its gonna get a little antiquated within the next year, and some games reportedly run faster in directX11. Assuming the CPU isn't your bottleneck I know this is at least the case in WoW.