Burnout Paradise bottleneck?

[Sevillian273]

I bought Burnout Paradise Ultimate box a couple weeks ago and at first it seemed like my dated rig handled it pretty well. (its a very fast game with up to date graphics) As I've progressed in the game and earned faster cars, the frame rate has dropped considerably especially when racing with A.I. cars. Its gotten to the point where its too frustrating to drive the faster cars. (graphics are at lowest possible settings)

I know I need a new machine but thats pretty much out of the question since Ive had to take a ridiculous paycut recently. (it was either that or GTFO...) So I've got to make do with what I have. (see sig)

I was wondering how I can tell where or what the bottleneck is for this game. I've recently put in a Sapphire HD 3850 AGP http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102730 I believe its the fastest AGP card out there. I can play FarCry on very high with full AA and AF smooth as glass on this card. I can play the Crysis demo smoothly on medium also. High gets choppy at times.

My machine gets 25557 3dmarks on 3DMark03 and 6757 on 3dmark05. Ive got 3 sticks of 512 PC2700 and my Northwood 3.0ghz is overclocked to 3.3(it doesnt seem to make a difference with the 10% OC.)

I ordered 2 1gig sticks of the fastest PC3200 I could find http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145575 It is shown on the corsair website to have been tested for my board. It will be here soon. I really hope it helps, I hate dumping $$ into this outdated machine but a new rig would be months and months away...

The only thing left to upgrade that I can think of would be the fastest processor that this board can handle which is the SL7E6 Prescott 3.4E with 1mb cache. I can get one for $76 on Ebay but I dont know if there would be much of an improvement over what I have now. Being a prescott, I'd hate to find out I need a better HSF too...

My current board and PSU:

MB http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16813131527

PSU http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817171014

EDIT: I play this game on a 19" CRT at only 1024x768

[pam123]

The power supply is fine but adding a new CPU just won't make much difference.
The new ram and the new video card are as far as it makes sense to go.

[Khalil]

I have run into this issue with a few of my customer's obsolete computers. I hate to be negative but I don't see the 2GB Ram making much different (I hope I am wrong).
Sorry to hear about your pay cut. It seems to be happening to a lot of people.
The good news is you have a good power supply, a case, a hard drive and optical drives you can work with.
The only things you need are a mobo, a cpu and a video card.
The combination of the AMD 7850 and the ATI 4850 are just awesome. Depending on when you are ready to buy the new hardware you shouldn't realistically need to spend more than $300 to get what you need to game. Here is an example
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819103678
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131381
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814102837
The good news is you can get around $150 for your obsolete hardware on eBay.
I recently sold a few CPUs like the one you are using for $40 each, the video card should get you $75 easily, the motherboard about $35 and $15 per stick of 512 memory. If it goes like I described you are out $150 for lots of excitement and gaming fun.
I hope it is doable for you.
Good luck!

[Sevillian273]

Thanks for the input. Glad to hear that the cpu and gfx card is a good combo. Those are the ones Ive had my eye on. I was planning on this Gigabyte board though http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813128387 its got eSATA and what appears to be an upgraded chipset over the ASUS, It's also won a customer choice award.

Unfortuantely its going to cost a bit more than you spec'd out since I'll need DDR2 Ram to go with it. I'd also hate to build a new machine only to put in my old IDE hard drive, although it would get me by untill I can afford a SATA 3.0 disk. I dont know if it would be worth the trouble of loading all my stuff twice..

I agree with Pam - I've gone about as far as it makes sense to go with this thing. I really dont think the bottleneck is the video card because the most noticeable drop in game performance occurs when the computer is running the A.I. vehicles and turning the graphics up doesnt seem to hurt performance any worse. The card also doesnt get nearly as hot as when I'm playing Farcry maxed out.

I cant tell if its the CPU or the ram... I do know that Burnout doesnt like only one gig of ram though! I get critical errors and BSODs with 1 gig. For some reason I cant get more than a 300mhz overclock on this board either without random reboots. I wonder if the new ram will help with that... BIOS doesnt have an option to adjust the voltage... Its probably not worth risking the fastest processor I own anyway...

Ughhh... I guess I better just start saving my money.