upgrading an old pc

[mo1e]

Hello all ive had my pc for roughly 4 years now. and although i dont know much about pcs and gaming it has served its purpose. I decided to give gaming a go on the pc but it only had an onboard radion xpress 200 graphics chip.

So yesterday i decided to buy a graphics card, because obviously its beter to have one then to just use the onboard chip. i bought a nvidia gforce gt 610 2gb. ( it was cheap and its got to be better then nothing) Anyway i ran a game and it looks great. alot better then i was hoping for, But the problem is that the game runs all choppy. is this due to the card or do i alse need to uprade the ram or cpu?

Here are my dissapointing specs 

Windows xp service pack 2
compaq presario
amd athlon 64 processor
3200+
1.99 GHz, 512 MB of ram

[mytymaus007]

not sure what yur main goal is to play emulator or just PC games but i would upgrade the memory especially for PC games, but all in all depending on the amount of money you have it might be cheaper to buy an updated PC. So i would make a list of things you want to use PC for and go from there

[PL1]

The video card looks MORE than fine for running MAME (not much video card needed) or Visual Pinball/Future Pinball. (lots more video card needed)

512 MB of ram

Looks like this might be a big part of the problem.  Bump it up to at least 1 GB, preferably 2 (maybe even 4) and I think you'll like the results.  Should cost you around ~$20-80 (not sure what variety of RAM your motherboard needs) and do way more for MAME than the card did.

If your MB can handle it and you can find a deal on a used 6000+ (Amazon has one for $75 used at the moment) you can triple your processor power, but considering the expense of buying the new video card, RAM, and processor, you might just want to return the card and take the plunge to get a new system.

If you don't take the plunge, consider fine tuning what processes are running.  After 4 years, who knows what you've got running in the background.   


Scott

[paigeoliver]

You barely have enough ram to boot the system. My 4 year old PC came with 8 GB.

[HaRuMaN]

You barely have enough ram to boot the system. My 4 year old PC came with 8 GB.

64 bit OS.  He's most likely running 32 bit.

[kixfan]

While I agree with everyone that you could use some more memory, I do have something else you can check.   If you are trying to run mame, I remember I had a heck of a time getting it to work with my video card.   Mame would default to a video mode that would use the system processor and cause it to run choppy.  I had to fiddle (the technical term) with the drivers to get it to work.

[paigeoliver]

Yes, but even 32 bit XP service pack 2 will hit the swap file before it even finishes booting with 512 MB. My el cheapo 4 year old netbook has 1 GB and my 6 year old laptop has 2 GB.

You barely have enough ram to boot the system. My 4 year old PC came with 8 GB.

64 bit OS.  He's most likely running 32 bit.

[theonegoku]

My mame did much better when i upgraded my external card as well, but for the the choppiness you definitly gotta upgrade the ram.  Where you go from there is up to you.  My journey led me to a new processor, which led to a new MoBo to prevent bottlenecking...but now...i couldn't be happier

[lilshawn]

You barely have enough ram to boot the system. My 4 year old PC came with 8 GB.

64 bit OS.  He's most likely running 32 bit.

he means if you have more than 4gb ram you need to use a 64bit OS otherwise with the 32bit OS you only have access to 3.25gb (or some crap number) regardless of how much RAM is installed.


I agree 512MB ram is your dog here. Your puter is wasting all sorts of time swapping info in and out of the cache to deal with it. Increased resolution means need more RAM to place it. The videocard has 4x the ram you system has.  it should be the other way around. Upgrade. Especially since 4gb of ram can be had for about $40 now a days.

next dog in your system is going to be the processor/motherboard. Most gaming now pretty much requires a dual core. You can get by with a single core if it's fast...yours is marginal. 3800+ or a 4000+ can get by okay. 3600+...eghhhhh. I'd suspect the compaq board is running a slow bus which is going to slow things down considerably.

You can build yourself a decent dual core gaming system for $300 since you already have a half decent videocard. just a matter of grabbing a board/dual core processor (maybe an AMD Athlon II X2 260u if you can find them still  ) and 4gb ram stick. That computer would be about 4 or 5 times fater than what you have there.

[PL1]

Yes, but even 32 bit XP service pack 2 will hit the swap file before it even finishes booting with 512 MB. My el cheapo 4 year old netbook has 1 GB and my 6 year old laptop has 2 GB.

You barely have enough ram to boot the system. My 4 year old PC came with 8 GB.

64 bit OS.  He's most likely running 32 bit.

I think Haruman was trying to politely remind you (and OP) of the 32 bit OS/4GB limitation.

We all agree that upgrading the RAM is a good idea. 

The question is how much he needs to buy.

1 GB = might work 
2 GB = probably work
4 GB = definitely work
8 GB = too much/waste of money for this setup


Scott

[HaRuMaN]

Yup, was talking about the RAM limitation of 32 bit.

[mo1e]

ok Thank you so much guys. next stop on payday is a 4gb ram. thanks for your help guys.