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Gaming on P4 2.8GHz

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Joseph F said:
If he's adamant about only upgrading his GPU, I would recommend this as well.
However, I seriously doubt that he has PCI-E, as he's running a P4 2.8.
If he doesn't have PCI-E, There is no card at a reasonable price that is worth upgrading to.
Have you seen the prices on AGP GeForce 7800GS's?
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There was a 2.8ghz P4 made for 775 as well.
http://ark.intel.com/products/27477/Intel-Pentium-4-Processor-620-supporting-HT-Technology-%282M-Cache-2_80-GHz-800-MHz-FSB%29
 
MrTeal said:
Seriously, you made an account today to singly crap on this thread?

OP -Warcraft 3? BF1942?
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How am I thread crapping? The OP has done nothing but be difficult and act odd. People have tried to help him but he cant even answer what game that he plays.
 
Its along time to be playing the game... so....
First person shooter with online play? or some MMO? Hack n Slash?

Those seem like the most likely candidates.

Warcraft III?Battlefield 1942 online? (looks like still plenty of servers with it)
Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind?
Unreal Tournament 2003?
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault?

World of Warcraft is from 2004.... could be this?


edited after I saw it above:

Dark Age of Camelot 🙂 the epic RvR MMO.
How are things in DAoC? still enough pplz around on servers?
 
DAoC is surviving, barely. Been playing for 10 years, and I always come back to this game. Realizing it's not going to be around forever and, to me, there just isn't anything that compares. Makes me sad.
 
cdmccool said:
Dark Age of Camelot

Bit anti-climatic, sorry.
Click to expand...

Rather than tell you your rig is a piece of crap and that you need i5 2500k + some high end AMD or Nvidia video card (which was the general theme of the other responses), I'll give you an honest answer. 7300GT is a VERY low end card, and even on a P4 2.8 it's going to be a bottleneck. My girlfriends P4 3.0GHz (lga775, pci express) was generally GPU limited, not CPU limited with a Radeon 4670 which is a lot more powerful than a 7300gt. The resolution you're playing at also makes a big difference (in my girlfriends case it was 1680x1050 as that was her monitor's native resolution)

Too bad your system is PCI express I have a Geforce 6600 AGP card I would have sold you on the cheap which would have been a decent upgrade from a 7300gt. Either way, any modern card for ~$50 will be a huge step up from what you have. The P4 will most likely still be a bottleneck(depending on resolution and how cpu dependent your game is(MMORPG's tend to be fairly cpu dependent)) but it should perform a lot better than what you have. You can probably find a used ATI 4850 for cheap(well under $50) that would be definitely more than powerful enough to max out that p4
 
OP, you might get a bump, but...

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/48

Your CPU would be just about at the bottom of that chart, if not at the bottom. Well below the P4 @ 3.6GHz that is 4th from the bottom. Do you know why it's at the bottom? Because the CPU is the bottleneck. You might get a bit of a bump from a new card, but here's the thing... every game is different. Everyone in this thread is only trying to help you, but you left out the single most important detail. With over 1,000 posts and 6 years on this forum, one would think that this little matter of which software you are running makes all the difference in the world wouldn't be so foreign to you. This is why some people think you must be trolling. I'm honestly not sure about your intentions at this point either, even though the OP was innocent enough.
 
DAoC is surviving, barely. Been playing for 10 years, and I always come back to this game. Realizing it's not going to be around forever and, to me, there just isn't anything that compares. Makes me sad.
Click to expand...

My game like that was FFXI 🙂

I played that for like 6years or more, halfways crazy to think of how much time you spend on stuff like that.

I quit for good though, I *purposefully* sent out all my items and gold, and deleted my characters.
(it takes about 2-3months of group parties to level up to cap, for each class, so if you delete one with like 8 x 75's and all the area's unlocked, the story paths, the Merit skills ect.... that ll likely you a year or more to redo)

Now im abit sad I did, really no other MMO like it out there either.
 
Op a pentium g840 would be a excellent starting point for a gaming rig.

The hd2000 in the chip is 3-4x faster then a 7200gs and yes i have tested this out with games against a 7200gs i had sitting around plus its gonna be more energy efficient while worlds faster.

My first gaming rig was for BF2 back in 2006 with a oced p4 at 3.4ghz and a 7800gs and it crawled at some points so trust me don't kid yourself with the p4,just grab the pentium g840.🙂
 
imported_Icecold said:
Rather than tell you your rig is a piece of crap and that you need i5 2500k + some high end AMD or Nvidia video card (which was the general theme of the other responses), I'll give you an honest answer. 7300GT is a VERY low end card, and even on a P4 2.8 it's going to be a bottleneck. My girlfriends P4 3.0GHz (lga775, pci express) was generally GPU limited, not CPU limited with a Radeon 4670 which is a lot more powerful than a 7300gt. The resolution you're playing at also makes a big difference (in my girlfriends case it was 1680x1050 as that was her monitor's native resolution)

Too bad your system is PCI express I have a Geforce 6600 AGP card I would have sold you on the cheap which would have been a decent upgrade from a 7300gt. Either way, any modern card for ~$50 will be a huge step up from what you have. The P4 will most likely still be a bottleneck(depending on resolution and how cpu dependent your game is(MMORPG's tend to be fairly cpu dependent)) but it should perform a lot better than what you have. You can probably find a used ATI 4850 for cheap(well under $50) that would be definitely more than powerful enough to max out that p4
Click to expand...

The OP doesn't even have a 7300GT, he has an LE which is half the card. Despite what many have claimed here, he is not likely going to be CPU bottlenecked with that card.

Tell you what cmdccool, tell me what amount of RAM you're running and I'll run a bench with an LGA775 P4 @ 2.8GHz with an HD2400 Pro and then a HD5570. The 2400Pro is probably a little faster than your 7300LE, but it should be reasonably similar.
 
For the game that the OP wants to play, sure his cpu is fine. The people that think his cpu can play newer modern games have no idea what they are talking about.

imported_Icecold, that is not really true. A 4670 can play ANY game out there on the right settings. A 3.0 P4 would struggle in many games to deliver a playable framerate and some games would stand no chance of being playable.
 
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SlowSpyder said:
Get that 5570, and then with the money left over in your budget you can step up to this badboy. Good, cheap upgrades for an older game.
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I don't think the $20 for an upgrade from a 2.8GHz to a 3.4GHz P4 is worth it in this case. Hell, I sold a E4300 for $20 shipped a month ago, and that's a much bigger step up.
 
MrTeal said:
I don't think the $20 for an upgrade from a 2.8GHz to a 3.4GHz P4 is worth it in this case. Hell, I sold a E4300 for $20 shipped a month ago, and that's a much bigger step up.
Click to expand...

*edit - WAIT! I forgot, the E4300 is a dual core. What I said below, I take it back. 🙂

I imagine the two are actually probably pretty close. Of course once you overclock the picture changes dramatically. But, stock clock performance vs. stock clock performance, I have to think those two are fairly near one another.
 
To OP: You know that you can get a 65nm 3.4GHz Pentium 4 651 on eBay for less than $15, right?
It would be a nice little performance upgrade and would probably put out less heat than your current CPU.
Just search for SL9KE, that's the one you want.

(Yes, I know that you didn't ask for a better CPU, but I figured that you might be interested since they're cheaper than dirt)
 
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trek554 said:
imported_Icecold, that is not really true. A 4670 can play ANY game out there on the right settings. A 3.0 P4 would struggle in many games to deliver a playable framerate and some games would stand no chance of being playable.
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I'm not disagreeing with that. I was just saying at 1680x1050 resolution, the games she was playing, and the settings they were at, the GPU generally was the bottleneck. My girlfriend wasn't trying to play Battlefield 3 or any other super CPU demanding games either. I have also since built her a machine with an Athlon X4 2.8GHz with 8GB of ram and it does everything so much better than that past its prime P4.

A Pentium 4 is a huge bottleneck for current games, I definitely don't disagree with that. I run a Phenom II X6 overclocked to 4.0GHz and I'm sure there are circumstances even for that(skyrim?) where the CPU is the bottleneck. What I was trying to get at in my post was that even on a p4 2.8ghz, a 7300 is a really low end card and would be the bottleneck in most cases. For a 10 year old game, even a very cheap video card upgrade would improve the quality and FPS.
 
I finally just swapped out my wife's single core 3.0Ghz P4. That thing died playing flash games, but was decent for a game like Lord Of the Rings: Online with the settings turned way down. With that said I had a Radeon 4850 in it, so pretty much every game was CPU bound.
 
One thing I know about mmo's is that they are more about cpu/server interaction than graphics (specially old games with no special shaders/effects). So most people were not wrong to suggest cpu instead of vid card upgrade.
 
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MrTeal said:
Tell you what cmdccool, tell me what amount of RAM you're running and I'll run a bench with an LGA775 P4 @ 2.8GHz with an HD2400 Pro and then a HD5570. The 2400Pro is probably a little faster than your 7300LE, but it should be reasonably similar.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the offer, but it's not necessary. I went ahead and ordered the 5570 as I think that is a fantastic deal. Several posters seem confident I will see an fps boost, and even if I don't it's nice to have an extra video card around. For $30 it's a win/win, there is no lose in this situation.

I play at 1360x768 since people are still asking.
 
I run a P4 2.8 paired with a 7600gt
It runs Portal, a few other older titles. Some at 1600x1200 others at lower resolutions.
Anything more than a 7600gt (or equivalent) is wasted on it.

However..for $30 rock on with your bad self.

A few things that I didn't catch.
What chipset are you using. What does it have? AGP or PCIe
If it is PCIe what spec is it? Newer cards might not work on the 1.0a spec.
 
pauldun170 said:
I run a P4 2.8 paired with a 7600gt
It runs Portal, a few other older titles. Some at 1600x1200 others at lower resolutions.
Anything more than a 7600gt (or equivalent) is wasted on it.

However..for $30 rock on with your bad self.

A few things that I didn't catch.
What chipset are you using. What does it have? AGP or PCIe
If it is PCIe what spec is it? Newer cards might not work on the 1.0a spec.
Click to expand...

He's using PCI-E. All PCI-E cards, regardless of version, should work with any PCI-E slot.
 
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