Already time to upgrade my vid card?

[unbot]

i have a ~1yr old system that seems to be lagging a little when i'm running it on a recently purchased westinghouse 37" lvm37se, which i set to 1920x1080. normal web browsing is fine but it seems to stutter on 1080 video content, and playing games on it doesn't seem to be quite smooth at all.

here's the system:
amd x2 3800
Epox 9npa+ ultra
Patriot 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Dual Channel
Antec SLK3000b
Seasonic S12-500 PSU
EVGA 7900gt

maybe it's time to upgrade the video card? any suggestions, hopefully ones that won't require me to change other components?

 

[BenSkywalker]

Need a bit more info from you, namely what OS you are running and what games you are looking to play and at what settings. You have a fairly balanced system overall, so pointing out where your bottleneck is will come down to the particulars mentioned.

 

[Rike]

XP rig? I'd say yes to the vid card and OC your CPU. Throwing extra ram in is also a possibility, but I'd do that as a very last resort; a pair of 512MB sticks to keep costs down and not waste a bunch of memory on the 32-bit memory limit.

 

[Flipped Gazelle]

Originally posted by: Rike
XP rig? I'd say yes to the vid card and OC your CPU. Throwing extra ram in is also a possibility, but I'd do that as a very last resort; a pair of 512MB sticks to keep costs down and not waste a bunch of memory on the 32-bit memory limit.

+1 for all that.

If you want to stick with Nvidia, perhaps a 9800gt.

 

[Leyawiin]

Your motherboard is a Socket 939, which is getting pretty hard to find an upgrade for anymore. As someone said, possible OC the CPU (might need a better heatsink/fan) and something like a 9600 GT or 9800 GT (at the most) would help.

 

[Andrew1990]

9800GT is an awesome card, especially for that processor.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

What are you using to watch your 1080p videos? You should try the latest VLC: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html

On my Athlon XP rig it would struggle to even play 720p videos using Quicktime or WMP. Now I can actually watch 720p videos flawlessly as well as some 1080p videos, although there is an occasional pause here and there.

 

[unbot]

system is not OC'd and just running on stock heatsink/fan, under XP pro. i occasionally play crysis and cod4. i guess i can live with some pausing here and there since i don't game tooooo much but for watching 1080 content, it's slightly annoying to see pauses. through HD stuff on hulu, it'll frame really horribly on the 37" westy but will be fine if i switch it to an older 19" CRT (i also leave it buffered for a while to make sure it's not bandwidth that's causing the slow frames). or sometimes i'll download a 1080 trailer from the apple site and watch it through qtime, which indeed does plays quite smoothly, but will stutter on occassion (which drives me insane!). maybe it's a player issue? hrrrrm

thanks for all the suggestions. maybe the first thing i should at the least do is do some OC'ing but i seriously need to read up before i fry anything!

 

[cubeless]

go for the $119 ar 4850 @ newegg... it will be way too much gpu for that rig, especially if u r not oc'ing that chip (i'm typing on a 2.5ghz 3800 with an 8800gts640), but it can be put in your next rig...

it is the best deal going right now...

 

[cusideabelincoln]

Well part of my point is that your 3800+ is much faster than my 2800+, so I don't see you having any issues playing 1080p content with the latest VLC.