Elaborated PSU question.

[GhandiInstinct]

I have an old 2000 Dell that has a 80gb 8mb cache hd, CDRW, Audigy, lan card, G4 4200, 512 ram and a p3 800 cpu. The psu is 200 watts. Now I believe that's just on the border line of running my system fine. But I just recently put in a 9600XT. And I get like 10 fps a second in Warcraft 3 with lots of units on screen even on the lowest resolution.

Now is this a PSU problem? Or an old motherboard problem? Cause my graphics didn't improve by the switch of cards. But logicaly thinking, if it didn't get enough power then it wouldn't work at all right?

 

[MEDISIN]

It seems to me your limiting factor in achieving higher fps is that P3 800 and the board it's attatched to. The 9600XT should be able to handle most games at decent resolution. Of course if you upgrade the CPU and MOBO then you will likely need a stronger PSU to power it all!

Warning, upgrading can be habbit forming 😀

I'm a firm believer that a GOOD PSU is a must for any system and is not a part I would skimp on.

Not sure what's causing the artifacts you are experiencing - probably just the system trying to keep up.

I don't know what kind of budget you operate on, but if you're interested in gaming you're probably going to have to upgrade that CPU and some of the other core components.

Good luck.

 

[GhandiInstinct]

I guess it is the cpu, darn 🙁.

 

[Sonic587]

That CPU is definitely limiting you. And if that's SDRAM, that's a 1-2 punch on performance. Are you thinking about upgrading?

 

[0roo0roo]

your cpu your ram your m/b ... you can't expect a vid card to make up for that gap. maybe if yo had an older athlon xp or something you could expect ot get by, but p3 800 is too far.

 

[Tiamat]

hmm, im not sure. My older bro has a Slot 750mhz athlon with 512MB LL Mushkin SD ram and Radeon 8500LE and plays warcraft III no prob at 1280x1024.

 

[prometheusxls]

Originally posted by: GhandiInstinct
I have an old 2000 Dell that has a 80gb 8mb cache hd, CDRW, Audigy, lan card, G4 4200, 512 ram and a p3 800 cpu. The psu is 200 watts. Now I believe that's just on the border line of running my system fine. But I just recently put in a 9600XT. And I get like 10 fps a second in Warcraft 3 with lots of units on screen even on the lowest resolution.

Now is this a PSU problem? Or an old motherboard problem? Cause my graphics didn't improve by the switch of cards. But logicaly thinking, if it didn't get enough power then it wouldn't work at all right?

#1 Power issues are very difficult to diagnose. If after much time and after eliminating other variables usually you endup being left between the mobo or PSU being the culprit if you have weird power offs or other issues. At that point you have to test both to be sure.

#2 Most PCs don't really use much more than 200W as it is. If you have a minimum number of HDD and optical Discs (total of 2) then you may net really need more than 200W. Even if you have a big new Prescott that gobbles up the power.

#3 WC3, because of the huge ammount of AI in the game (especiall when there are many charachters running arround on screen), is extremely CPU limited. And would be totally pegged on your system. It doesn't matter if you had a 6800U in there it still wont help the fact that the AI is whats slowing you down. Get a better CPU, Better than 3GHz / 3000+ and then reevaluate.

#4 When you upgrade that means a new MOBO, CPU, RAM, and alsmot deffiantely a new PSU, Go with something like the seasonic supertornado or super silencer 300W. Its about $60 from Newegg and is probably the best thing you can buy under 400W.

#5 You only need 400W+ if you have water cooling, a big drive array w/ nmultiple 10K+ RPM Drives, or some sort of power hungry additional hardware running in the PC.