forteh Posted January 3, 2010 Report Share Posted January 3, 2010 (edited) I recently acquired a copy or arma2 (loved the original opflash and this is awesome) and my machine is struggling to run it at more than 15 fps despite being recommended specs The machine is pretty old now but this is the 1st game that its had any problems with, quick spec is: - Athlon 64 x2 4400 (socket 939) Abit AN8 SLI 3 gb DDR @200mhz 512mb geforce 9600GT Audigy LS soundcard Winxp 32 - SP3 All drives thoroughly defragged. Im not sure what the bottle neck is with arma, tried all sorts of configurations but the fps barely tops 20 and thats on min settings which looks pretty poor to be fair. I cant upgrade my processor any because its on socket 939 which is now obsolete, I could overclock it though. Main problem with overclocking is 2 gig of the ram (2x1gig sticks) is only rated for 200mhz, the other gig is good for 277mhz (PC4400), if I take the 2x1 sticks out it overclocks fine but the lack of ram makes it even worse as its constantly paging; Im assuming that if I get another 2x1 gig sticks of PC4400 then I should be able to achieve a decent overclock and retain the ram. Im loathe to go out and just buy a bigger gfx card if its the cpu thats the bottle neck, I cant justify/afford to replace the motherboard/cpu/ram right now (unless someone knows of some decent deals) and as I already have a decent cooler and fan I may aswell try the overclocking 1st. Is there anyone on here thats familiar with overclocking the athlon 64s? Ive not overclocked a CPU since the old thunderbird/athlonXP days and its all changed with the 64 bit architecture Can anyone hold my hand whilst I do it? Beers in advance edit: if anyone has got some old high speed DDR ram spare, 250mhz+ ideally, then I may well be interested in buy some Edited January 3, 2010 by forteh Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muel Posted January 3, 2010 Report Share Posted January 3, 2010 Seems to me Ed that the whole system is the bottle neck, the spec is all balanced if you ask me, to see a big improvement I'd recommened starting afresh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
forteh Posted January 4, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 Seems to me Ed that the whole system is the bottle neck, the spec is all balanced if you ask me, to see a big improvement I'd recommened starting afresh. Dammit, thought you might say that Ill pick up some more decent ram and clock the tits off this cpu (its supposed to be good for about 2.6 gig, up from the stock 2.2) as I have decent cooling, that should keep the fps up for a little while yet. On the new system front, what should I be looking at these days? When I switched to A64 the core duo (conroe) was just out and was the chip to go for, obviously its all changed now so whats recommended? Ive always had amd cpus and abit boards but if a switch is a sound investment then I will. I want something mid range (about a year old so cheap? ), with some overclocking potential, am I likely to get cpu, motherboard, ram and gfx card for 3-400 quid? If needed I can keep this 9600GT and just upgrade that at a later date. PSU should be good still, will probably invest in a new faster HDD as my old sata drive is pretty slow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weirdoku Posted January 4, 2010 Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 My SLI system doesn't run it very well either, since the game did not support SLI out of the box, I'm not sure if they have patched things up now though. Your system really isn't up to scratch, the min requirements always lie, you always need something a bit above to play it at decent settings with decent fps. Your system is a bit lacking for that game, I don't know much about amd cpus but overclocking it as you said would help a little bit and the same with ram but I really doubt there would be much improvement unless you upgrade you system. I might be changing mobo, ram and cpu soon to something more recent and I am looking to sell them in a bundle if you are interested. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
forteh Posted January 4, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 I found SLI to be the biggest crock of shite as only a few games supported it (might be different matter now), I believe you can get armaII to run in sli by renaming the executable to crysis.exe and using the crysis sli profile, not sure how that works but apparantly it does I wouldnt mind if my specs were on the minimum, but it pretty much excedes the recommended and still runs like a dog (Ive got more ram but a slightly lower gfx card). Minimum specs: • Dual Core CPU (Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz, Intel Core 2.0 GHz, AMD Athlon 3200+ or faster) • 1 GB RAM • GPU (Nvidia Geforce 7800 / ATI Radeon 1800 or faster) with Shader Model 3 and 256 MB VRAM • Windows XP • DVD (Dual Layer compatible) • 10 GB free HDD space Recommended specs: • Quad Core CPU or Dual Core CPU (Intel Core 2.8 GHz, AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or faster) • 2 GB RAM • GPU (Nvidia Geforce 8800GT / ATI Radeon 4850 or faster) with Shader Model 3 and 512 MB VRAM • Windows XP or Windows Vista • DVD (Dual Layer compatible) • 10 GB free HDD space What spec are you looking at selling? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krisboats Posted January 4, 2010 Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 Its well known to be a complete pig to run well. Mine won't play it smoothly and i've got a 4850 overclocked to 4870 speeds. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
forteh Posted January 4, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 Its well known to be a complete pig to run well. Mine won't play it smoothly and i've got a 4850 overclocked to 4870 speeds. Crap If I ditch the 2 gig of slow (200mhz) ram I can run my fsb up to 235 without any major problems, some more fiddling with voltages should see it stable above that; gives a core speed of 2.585Ghz. If I bump the fsb up to 270 and drop the multiplier clock down to 10.5 its 2.835Ghz assuming the chip will run that. As I said arma runs shockingly bad with a single gig of ram (no matter how fast it is) so I need to keep the ram size up to 3 gig minimum. Ive found that dropping the detail down to low and resolution 1024x768 with no FSAA manages about 17-20 fps which is much smoother but still not as fast as I would like Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Krisboats Posted January 4, 2010 Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 It's not going to make much of a difference unfortunately. Even on overclcoked highest-end hardware (Core i7; 12 GiByte RAM and a GTX 285 with 2 GiByte VRAM) ArmA 2 becomes a slide show (less than 15 fps) running at 1,280 x 1,024 pixels with very high details. You have to go to low or medium details and have to activate Pixel Doubling (which is ugly) to get playable framerates. http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,685770/...-2009/Practice/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
forteh Posted January 4, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 It's not going to make much of a difference unfortunately. http://www.pcgameshardware.com/aid,685770/...-2009/Practice/ Fair comment then, looks like Im going to be pretty stuffed either way. Engine needs more optimisation work Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weirdoku Posted January 4, 2010 Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 (edited) What spec are you looking at selling? Possibly evga 780i sli for the win edition mobo, 2.4ghz c2q q6600, 4x1gb ocz 1066mhz sli ram. Edited January 4, 2010 by weirdoku Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
forteh Posted January 4, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 (edited) Possibly evga 780i sli for the win edition mobo, 2.4ghz c2q q6600, 4x1gb ocz 1066mhz sli ram. Alot of that means bugger all to me, a bit of googling shows promise though, appears to be a high end overclockable sli board, a 2.4ghz quad core intel processor and 4 gig of (fast?) ram Couple of questions as I know next to nothing about intel chips and memory architecture/speeds: - Is the q6600 a good potential overclocker? Is the memory up to it? Have you overclocked it, if so, to what stable speed and what cooling? Am I correct in guessing that to overclock an intel chip you just need to play with the multipliers/clocks/voltages and keep it cool? I would prefer air cooling as I dont fancy the hassle of water (wont be going for massive overclocks anyways), does it come with a cooler? What sort of monies will you be looking at? edit: I have acquired another 2 gig of PC4400 ddr (corsair XMS to be exact) to match up with my geil ultrax, hopefully should get the cpu up to 2.5Ghz without much problem Edited January 4, 2010 by forteh Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Muel Posted January 4, 2010 Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 Possibly evga 780i sli for the win edition mobo, 2.4ghz c2q q6600, 4x1gb ocz 1066mhz sli ram. Basically Ed, depending on how much Wierdodude is after for this, this could be a good setup. It boils down to really, (in my opinion), i7 is great, but costs a fortune, whereas these old C2Qs can be had pretty cheap. (The Q6600 is a seriously good chip aswell, very good overclockers). Basically Ed if you want to upgrade the system you have now, I'd buy this lot. (Depending on your PSU and whether your hard drives are IDE or SATA. If you have IDE and the PSU isn't much cop, I'd sell that system and buy another). Thought about sticking with AMD? I have a 965 Black Edition processor in mine, it seems great, apparantly they're a match for the Q6600 and below. I'd say though get on the overclockers.co.uk forum, (think Krisboats got me on there actually), and they're really helpful, but also if you do 250 posts on there, you can get into the members market so you can buy and sell second hand stuff, and you get free postage on all purchases. Is the q6600 a good potential overclocker? Is the memory up to it? Yes, they'll reach 4ghz as far as I know. I'm not sure about on air cooling, but I've known of a couple that are used at about 3.6-3.8ghz for every day use with fairly low voltages and no issues. Yes, good ram that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
forteh Posted January 4, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 (edited) Sounds good then, will see how much weirdo wants for the setup once he comes to sell, will save a bit of cash on buying new and allow me to work towards a newer gfx card My main hdd is sata, its only 160 gig though, I have a 40gig ide storage drive aswell that is pretty much on the way out and should be replaced soon. Will probably get a 500gig sata and move the 160 to storage. My psu is a fairly spangly ocz thing, not super powerful (about 570W I think) but its been rock solid with an overclocked A64, 11 fans, 3hdds and a pair of sli gfx cards. edit: Ive got 2x1024 sticks of corsair xms PC4400 for 75 quid from ebay, the only PC4400 memory on google shopping is 256 quid for 2x512! Edited January 4, 2010 by forteh Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
weirdoku Posted January 4, 2010 Report Share Posted January 4, 2010 Sounds good then, will see how much weirdo wants for the setup once he comes to sell, will save a bit of cash on buying new and allow me to work towards a newer gfx card If I do sell I guess around £300???? I really don't know, never sold second hand computer stuff before. Only thing I've overclocked is the RAM, they are running at about 1000mhz Never even bothered to overclock the CPU. Everything is mint, I have the boxes for all of them as well, motherboard will come with all the cables etc etc. CPU was OEM but I'll just leave it in the mobo, I have a artic cooler freezer 7 pro (with box) on the cpu which might have to go with the bundle as well cos it probably won't fit the new socket cpus. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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