Upgrading gaming video card question

[Bimmer311]

Hello

I've recently upgraded my 6800gs to
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814121320

I play Aion and some CoD4. I saw a small upgrade but not the one I was expecting. I'm running on an old pc so my question is- Is something else holding back my performance? Or was I overestimating my $40 card?

Also I should add I plan to build a new computer around the end of next year when I graduate from basic training. I'm just looking for a cheap upgrade, to last me the next 4 months, that doesn't crap out when I run into those huge Aion battles.


HP Pavilion a1230n
Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3
2.20 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64
Board: ASUSTek Computer INC. Amberine M 1.03
3072 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory
NVIDIA GeForce 9600 GSO
Samsung SyncMaster 22.0"
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817339019 on the way

Thanks for any replies, you guys must get this question a lot.

[Masaki 7-11]

If that's a single core processor, that's most likely what's holding you back in performance. The 9600GSO 384MB is a pretty good card, I use it in one of my computers to play wow at 1080p with all settings on ultra (except for AA) and there is no lag (I get around 30fps). I'm using it with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 and 2GB of DDR2 ram.

I recommend turning down the graphics quality of the games to increase the performance; it will be expensive/difficult to upgrade to a better processor, so just tweaking the settings a bit should make your games work smoothly until you can get a better computer.

If you were/are running the games at stock settings, the settings will be set automatically depending on the video card, so your computer may have set the graphics higher when you installed the new graphics card making it run at around the same FPS as your old card.

[Bimmer311]

That was quick, thanks. I figured it had to be something besides the card. I turned the settings down to the lowest and still only got 8 fps in the bigger battles. This is all it said under the processor category in Belarc.

2.20 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache
64-bit ready
Not hyper-threaded

I'm not sure if you can tell if it's a single core or not from that

[Masaki 7-11]

Originally Posted by Bimmer311 That was quick, thanks. I figured it had to be something besides the card. I turned the settings down to the lowest and still only got 8 fps in the bigger battles. This is all it said under the processor category in Belarc. 2.20 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 128 kilobyte primary memory cache 1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache 64-bit ready Not hyper-threaded I'm not sure if you can tell if it's a single core or not from that

I just checked your system on google and it comes with a single core processor, try CPU-Z for information regarding CPU, motherboard and graphics card: http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.

[Bimmer311]

Alright. Thanks again for the help. Guess I'll be waiting on a new pc