Agreed george, i think the time has come for me to stop trying to upgrade this outdated rig and build something new.

It will be a case of little bits at i time though, to make it more affordable for me, so maybe one month i will buy a board and a CPU, next month RAM, next month GFX card, next month drives, next month a PSU, next month an OS (hopefully XP if still available to buy new) and so on... Then i can build it all up at the end and hopefully it will all work ok.

i would gladly give you some ideas about that

when, in the near future, you decide to start it, we'll be here for suggestions to save you some monies

I will look forward to it, thanks for your help george (and others)

Just for your info Danthe.
The CPU George suggested can make 500+ FPS on westhill with not very fast graphic card.

And I would rather save money month buy month and then buy it all because sometimes even between 2 month the prices might drop like 20 percent or more. Especially in case when new CPU/GPU generations are introduced.

I saw my mobo to fall down 10 Pounds just in 14 days!

what o/s you using? if your using vista it tends to need more than a gig of ram to run it smoothly. i used to have the ati hd2400 gfx card and to be honest i thought it was rubbish, worse than the ati x1650 i put in my kids pc, maybe have a look for a ati x1900 or better still as someone else has said one of the nvidia 8x series.

Im running on XP SP3 at the moment. I nearly bought vista, but once i saw how monumentally slow my parents brand new pc was with it, i opted to stay on XP.

oooof here we go again

amount of memory won't be of any help.
as long as it's 512MB, or more, you are... ok (just tried and lfs with 12 FBMs has 244MB peak working mem)

loading the game will be slower (since whatever is loaded will have to be swapped out to the hdd which is a slow process), the less ram you have, but the fps you will get eventually will be more or less same, no matter if you have 512MB or 12GB

Yep, its gonna be new PC time i think.

Now, do i buy everything new off the web, or scour ebay for bargian components that may be a year or so old, but will do what i need??

Quote from danthebangerboy :

Yep, its gonna be new PC time i think.

Now, do i buy everything new off the web, or scour ebay for bargian components that may be a year or so old, but will do what i need??

Try Games Booster. This was mentioned on the iRacing forums a while back, and I tried it out on my old PC and saw a 10-15 fps jump, however that was a very cluttered PC.

Games Booster closes down all unnecessary background process and services, cleans RAM and intensifies processing performance.

Could give a decent performance boost while you get your new PC up and running.

What is ur AA and AF settings at?.. Looks well higher than 4xAA...

Game Booster is already running when i play LFS, as for the AA/AF, it is all totally disabled in LFS but set up in the GFX cards control panel, as it gives me better FPS doing it that way than by using the options in LFS.

In the ATI control panel, AA/AF are both on 4x, but the performance option is selected as well, in both the opengl and direct3d options.

Everything else, mipmap, texture preference etc.. is all set to performance as well.

I am running 1024x768 32 bit resolution, lower resolutions or dropping to 16 bit make no difference to performance, and just makes it look crap.

The overclocking features will not work at all for the card, if i try and calculate clocks using auto overclocking, or try and set them manually all i get is an instant BSOD, but i think this is because the newest (and best) drivers that i am using are patched to work with AGP cards, so im guessing thats why some features do not work.

I also can't overclock my CPU, despite my mobo saying that it supports eastyuneIII in the manual, If i try and use the program it gives an error about not supporting my mainboard.

Quote from danthebangerboy :

Yep, its gonna be new PC time i think.

Now, do i buy everything new off the web, or scour ebay for bargian components that may be a year or so old, but will do what i need??

Before anyone can suggest anything you need a budget.

I have vista with no problems at all, if you buy anything close to a half decent PC it will run it. Just because your parents have a brand new PC doesn't mean the spec isn't shiiiiiiit some where. Sorry that's a little harsh but the words brand new really doesn't mean it's fast/any good.

Have to back up George here, the people suggesting more RAM really don't know much/anything. It will not help with FPS in any game at all. The only benefit from more RAM will be loading times...if you're lucky.

My PC (the important bits, motherboard, hard drives mean nothing for this):

Intel E6750
8GB DDR2 RAM
8800 GS 384MB (screen res 1680x1050)

That runs LFS totally maxed out and vista with absolutely no problems, was the same even when I had 2GB of RAM, only got 8 cause it was an amazing offer.

EDIT: Just read your last post. Set the AA/AF to 0 just to make sure, when looking for FPS they should be the first to go.

What about if you disable the AA in your graphic card?
I think the low frames are mainly because your old 2.4Ghz penitum was even much slower then my AMD A64 2Ghz in my previous system. I have been strugling at start in races where was 20+ players. I could not run 20Ai at start at all with decent frame rates.

I think you can build easily a new system for around 300-350 pounds (new case,powersupply,motherboard,CPU,4Gb of ram and graphic card) which I consider living in UK should not be a problem to gather within few month.

You would be able to play then every new games and LFS would run as smooth as you currently cant imagine.

I just wish i could OC my CPU.

My old system (pentium 1.8ghz and 512mb RAM with fx5500 GFX card, and a nice overclock friendly multiplier and fsb unlocked mobo) was running a large CPU overclock that i did which took it upto nearly 2.3ghz.

All i did to it cooling wise was overvolt the core a little bit and fitted a bigger CPU fan, and i only had one heat related incident when i tried to get it to 2.4ghz and it got hottish (64 degrees) so i put it back down again.

With it set at around 2.3 the hottest it would ever get was 59 degrees, even when under full load for 30 minutes while benchmarking, so it was very stable for a DIY job.

I also tweaked the RAM latency timings for a bit more performance, and gave the GFX card a sensible 20% overclock.

Once i got given this PC 2 years ago i gave the old one to the local cyber cafe thing for the kids in the village and its still running with that OC now, and all the kids love it as all the other computers have either voodoo2, or mx440 cards or worse.

I can't help but thing that with those kind of speed increases percentage wise, if i could OC this CPU, i could in theory get it upto about the 3ghz mark with very little work, which would help me.

I may go around the carboot sales as there are a few computer part stalls, and risk a tenner or so on a clockable board that will work with all my current hardware just to see, and if i do blow it up (doubtful) i do have an ancient 533mhz machine sat here from when i was at school that will at least allow me to get online to browse forums and check emails if the worst does happen.

I don't know why people keep talking shit about your P4, it is more than enough to play LFS decently. I have my P4 2.66GHz for 3 years now and the only problem I had with FPS was because the old motherboard was underclocking it to 2.1GHz, then I had so much lag in starts, but now it's fine, I really have no problem. Even with full grid, it doesn't suck.

Cheers for the vote of confidence in my CPU RenvoN, but i have tested it and the CPU just tops out at 100% all the time on large grids so it does look like it either can't cope, or is actually starting to die.

Quote from RenvoN :

Even with full grid, it doesn't suck.

screenshot pl0x

bangerboy here gets single digit fps with 20 cars.

let's see yours

I don't think it's really starting to die anyway. :P
Either a processor works normally or it doesn't work at all, and you can always try a fresh install of both Windows XP and LFS. Even if you reformatted it a month ago, it is really possible that your windows/lfs/both is/are damaged.

By the way, if possible, I suggest you to try out XP SP2, I felt my computer was slight slower after I installed SP3 and then I restored it back to SP2 again. Maybe it was just with me anyway.


@george,
hold on, i'll take it


EDIT: done

Even trying to OC the P4 would be pointless... If your motherboard supports 800mhz fsb and HT then get a P4 3.4HT for £10 off ebay..

Its what im using atm and get 70-110 fps when on th move with 4xAA and 8xAF with about 20fps for 10 secs on a busy grid... your gfx card is much better than my 7600GS too...

@renvon: interesting do the fps drop at T1? it's a wild difference, 3fps to 35fps which can not be explained easily unless there is something very wrong with bangerboy's pc (and we are not talking only about slight diferences in hardwre spcs)

@foilpact: read the previous thread, you can see what is the fastest cpu his mobo supports.

@bangerboy: dude, what fps do you get at starting ?

i'm going to bed i'm drunk

Quote from george_tsiros :

@renvon: interesting do the fps drop at T1? it's a wild difference, 3fps to 35fps which can not be explained easily unless there is something very wrong with bangerboy's pc (and we are not talking only about slight diferences in hardwre spcs)

FPS drops a bit to like 28~30 or so at T1, but it's pretty playable for me.
not to mention that bangerboy's videocard is much better than mine! (mine's like a 7600gs or so)

the only way my computer lags a lot with stuttery sound (or however it spells) is when I have connection lag, like when ping is above 0.30~35, cars start to be a mess on my screen and I get really low fps... if not, it's fine.

^^^^^^

AHA!! I think we may have a winner, my connection runs at ~200kbps at worst and ~450kbps at best, and i also get massive lag because my ping is ~300ms.

I never realised that internet connection lag had anything to do with actual ingame lag, but if it does, then that explains some of the issue, although the 100% CPU load and terrible FPS also happens when i try and have 20 AI on track at the same time.

Yea it really slows your computer down when cars start to lag so much. :P

btw a pentium 4 can't handle 20 AIs, i've tested that myself

renvon


an overclocked p4 with HT might handle 20 AIs