Pez D Spencer
Banned
A little over a year ago I built myself a pretty slammin gaming rig. It had an Operton 180, 2GB Corsair XMS, A8N32 mobo, and dual 7900GT's running in SLI. With this system I was able to get a nice 25% OC. I also had a 24" Dell LCD. It was pretty sweet and could handle just about anything when it came to gaming. However, last spring I decided I wanted to buy a motorcycle so I sold the computer and reverted back to my older system which is a 3.0GHz P4 Prescott, 512MB Kingston Hyper-X PC4300 DDR2, and a 256MB X600 PCI-E video card.
After I sold the computer, I pretty much gave up on gaming because there was no way that my P4 system would run games at 1900x1200 on that 24" Dell LCD. But now it's spring again and since I was low on cash to do some upgrades on my motorcycle I sold the Dell LCD and started using a 17" LCD.
Pretty much all I play are FPS games, so after I hooked the 17" LCD back up I installed Quake 4 and Far Cry. To my amazement they run fairly decent on mid to high settings at 800x600 or 1024x768. On both games I'm getting a consistent 40-60 FPS. FEAR is another story, as is HL2, but I was hoping a little bit of upgrading to this old box might help a little. I plan on saving my bread till Christmas time and dropping about 5K on a new system and monitor, but right now I just wanna spend a few bucks on this old computer so I can get a little more enjoyment out of gaming.
When I built this P4 system back a couple years ago I didn't know all that much about system building or overclocking and bought an Intel 915 mobo. This means that the extra money I spent on the Hyper-X overclocking RAM was of no use because this Intel board has no overclocking options.
So my questions to you all are this:
I want to put another 1GB of RAM in this system. Based on what I know, since my system isn't overclocked, my Hyper-X RAM is running at PC4200 and not PC4300. Would I be okay if I just put any old plain jane PC4200 RAM in with the Hyper-X? This Hyper-X has fairly low latencies (which I can't recall right off), and I understand that I would have to raise the timing of the Hyper-X to meet the cheaper RAM, but could mixing non-Hyper-X RAM with the Hyper-X RAM cause me any problems? I plan on putting in two 512MB sticks along side the two sticks of 256MB Hyper-X I currently have so I still run in dual channel mode, but I was just wondering what you all thought about this.
I also want to upgrade my video card. I found an X1600 512MB on eBay for fairly cheap and was thinking about going with this. I'm not trying to spend more than about 100 bucks on a new card, so if not this card, what do you guys think would be a good upgrade option? I can jack up the clock speed on the X600 I currently have to 600MHz (the default clock speed is 400MHz), without problems (the memory wont OC at all), so really, now that I think about it, the X1600 might not even be that much of an upgrade other than a little faster memory speeds. Tell me what you think. Since I'm only using a 17" LCD, my resolutions won't be more than 1280x1024.
Sorry for the long post, but maybe you guys can give me a little input on all this.
After I sold the computer, I pretty much gave up on gaming because there was no way that my P4 system would run games at 1900x1200 on that 24" Dell LCD. But now it's spring again and since I was low on cash to do some upgrades on my motorcycle I sold the Dell LCD and started using a 17" LCD.
Pretty much all I play are FPS games, so after I hooked the 17" LCD back up I installed Quake 4 and Far Cry. To my amazement they run fairly decent on mid to high settings at 800x600 or 1024x768. On both games I'm getting a consistent 40-60 FPS. FEAR is another story, as is HL2, but I was hoping a little bit of upgrading to this old box might help a little. I plan on saving my bread till Christmas time and dropping about 5K on a new system and monitor, but right now I just wanna spend a few bucks on this old computer so I can get a little more enjoyment out of gaming.
When I built this P4 system back a couple years ago I didn't know all that much about system building or overclocking and bought an Intel 915 mobo. This means that the extra money I spent on the Hyper-X overclocking RAM was of no use because this Intel board has no overclocking options.
So my questions to you all are this:
I want to put another 1GB of RAM in this system. Based on what I know, since my system isn't overclocked, my Hyper-X RAM is running at PC4200 and not PC4300. Would I be okay if I just put any old plain jane PC4200 RAM in with the Hyper-X? This Hyper-X has fairly low latencies (which I can't recall right off), and I understand that I would have to raise the timing of the Hyper-X to meet the cheaper RAM, but could mixing non-Hyper-X RAM with the Hyper-X RAM cause me any problems? I plan on putting in two 512MB sticks along side the two sticks of 256MB Hyper-X I currently have so I still run in dual channel mode, but I was just wondering what you all thought about this.
I also want to upgrade my video card. I found an X1600 512MB on eBay for fairly cheap and was thinking about going with this. I'm not trying to spend more than about 100 bucks on a new card, so if not this card, what do you guys think would be a good upgrade option? I can jack up the clock speed on the X600 I currently have to 600MHz (the default clock speed is 400MHz), without problems (the memory wont OC at all), so really, now that I think about it, the X1600 might not even be that much of an upgrade other than a little faster memory speeds. Tell me what you think. Since I'm only using a 17" LCD, my resolutions won't be more than 1280x1024.
Sorry for the long post, but maybe you guys can give me a little input on all this.
