I don't get it...

[elfs]

So, is a Sempron 3100 (512 MB) plus a nVidia Fe5500/256MB supposed to be slower than an Athlon 2700 (512 MB) plus a nVidia TI4200/128MB?

This thing runs Quake 4 like crap!

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Well, the 5500 is worse than the 4200, the Athlon should be be better too. So yeah, supposed to be.

Might want to use this to judge relative strengths of cards: http://www.overclock.net/graphics-cards-general/54675-graphics-card-ranking.html

The Ti4200 is a few notches up from the 5500.

.....Jeffrey Boser

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

Ooooooh! Thank you thank you! I've been looking for a new cheatsheet! Mine was out of date. Woo! Now to find my anniversary present!

[(Anonymous)]

I found that and it helped me choose the x800 gto I bought.. I've been finding nvidia cards seriously flawed lately, the ati 9800 pro I bought was great, and I was depressed when I accidently killed it. The 6200 nvidia I bought was okay, but again and again I find 'quirks' with nvidia cards with some games that bug me. For example, the 6200 had the annoying habit of single-digit frame rates when ANY window was maximized (I almost never run a game full-screen). Its like nvidia just can't make a driver that performs consistently for an API, too many customizations for specific games are used to get the performance acceptable.

But that aside, I went looking on tomshardware and anandtech for a listing of relative speeds for various chipsets, and couldn't find anything good until I found that list. A little bit of research led me to the x800 gto gem (among fastest cards available for the agp platform, not the fastest, but not a waste of money or power either, much like the Ti4200 was). I'm pretty sure I could flash my x800gto, and unlock more performance, but after killing my 9800, its not worth the risk to me.

.....Jeff

[kitsap_charles]

Remember, Sempron:Athlon::Celeron:P4.

[trinsf.livejournal.com]

My geek boy who knows alllll about these things says that it's a cache issue, because of the Sempron.

[rarkrarkrark.livejournal.com]

If it's running everything like crap (some games will be more obvious about this than a lot of other apps) make sure you do the standard scandisk/defrag/virus check/adware check and dump the process table (ctrl-alt-delete in the windows world) and see if extra things are running. This fixes so many "It's gotta be slow hardware" speed issues in my life it's ridiculous.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Scandisk? Defrag? I can't seem to find these terms in my Linux Administrator's Guide anywhere.

[rarkrarkrark.livejournal.com]

Damn, I'm so used to being surrounded by the clueless I assumed. Bad drachen.

Anyway, in which case 'ps auxw' and check for things running that oughtn't be but you probably already know that.

(And if that's not the problem, it's almost certainly hardware. I'd swap the video cards around if possible, see if the old video card does better than the new one.)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've already checked the process table. I log out as "elf" and log back in as "gamer" to use a very lightweight window manager, so even Gnome and all the other modern crud that makes Linux easier to use (but not manage) is off while I game. I think others in this thread have it right: the $800 machine I bought four years ago beat the pants off the $300 machine I bought this weekend, and the four years do not make up for the reduced price. I'll just have to bite the bullet eventually, accept that I've wasted $90 of that price, and eventually buy a hotter CPU and GPU.

The CPU should be fine, IMHO.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

The video card is REALLY the limiting factor there though, the 5xxx series, as is mentioned below, generally performs like utter crap. Just upgrading that should give a very noticable performance boost.

And unlike the Celeron that cut all sorts of features that the main-line chips had, the Sempron is a full Athlon 64 (though early-production Semprons did have AMD64 mode disabled, all newer CPU's have it enabled) with half as much L2 cache. It's perfectly usable for gaming, and has at least as much cache as your Athlon 2700 did so that's a non-issue in terms of the upgrade.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the reason for the replacement was that the old video card's fan got so dusty it stopped turning and, in a blaze of glory, took out the rest of the system.

Sorry about the snark. I'm just not a Windows user.

[rarkrarkrark.livejournal.com]

What a way to go. I've always loved those really impressive failure modes.

I'm in vague agreement with velvet_wood -- sometimes it is cheaper to acquire a pre-built system through certain channels (stores that deal in overstocks and such) but most of the time she's right. Nearly all the time, even if the former is cheaper, the latter gets one better parts.

(The other exception is when one wishes a pre-built system with older/slower hardware. Not so good for gaming, though)

I'm in agreement with wolfwings, too. The video card is the most likely bottleneck.

Not stressed about the snark. I don't sysadmin anymore (getting my edumacashion) but I do deal with a small number of people whom I otherwise like who expect me to make their game machines run fast enough (is there such a thing?), and not one of them would have a clue with what to do with a linux box. So I saw your post and did the sort of kneejerk, half thinking, mumble the standard answer thing. If I'd been thinking I would have realized that you're not part of the above list, thus not my problem, and I would have just kept my mouth shut. *grin*

(the above about said friends is particularly weird because I don't run windows, to the point where the only time I've played with XP and ME is on other people's boxes, mostly theirs, and all the games I play run fairly well on a 486. But this may soon change as I may have to let XP in the house due to my non-linux using partner and MS finally giving up on 98. So not looking forward to that)

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

I don't sysadmin anymore (getting my edumacashion) but I do deal with a small number of people whom I otherwise like who expect me to make their game machines run fast enough (is there such a thing?),

Yes. They're available from Alienware.

*drool*

Preeeettttiees....

For the record, we're a multi-OS family,ranging from a linux box handling the network for security's sake to my uber-gaming windows machine. I loathe MS with every fiber of my being but... I'm a game slut, and I want to turn the graphics _ALLLLL_ the way up! So see, such folk do exist, I promise.

[rarkrarkrark.livejournal.com]

*chuckle*

Alienware is good and they have really pretty boxes, but they are well out of price range of my friends, at least the ones who think I'm a good game-box consultant. I think my primary advantage is that I work for hugs and hard cider. I have visual processing issues that make it hard for me to appreciate good graphics or play games with complex graphics (Escape from Castle Wolfenstein was a real challenge -- I mean, trying to figure out what all those shapes were supposed to represent, I kept shooting at wallhangings -- that the first and last FPS I ever played ;) ) so the more graphical things become, the less I like them. I do recognize that this is my personal wiring and not a universal issue. I use X entirely for graphics drivers for web browsers and to organize my terminal windows.

I do know very clued windows users/admins and gamers, but most of them would not consider me to be a very good game-box consultant. I can handle the hardware just fine, but I'm dependent on research skills to handle all but the most simple software issues. (Now, ask me to set up and run a large, high availability server farm running multiple unix-varients and I rock. Gaming just isn't my specialization.)

OTOH, so many windows problems are solved by the same magic incantation (scandisk,defrag yadda :) ) that I've threatened to train a parrot as my assistant. *grin*

Oh, and honestly my dread of letting XP or something in here is less technical and more due to licensing issues, which is something I have to research.

[norikos-author.livejournal.com]

The Nvidia 5xxx series were, for the most part, _crap_. If you can get your hands on even the oldest and slowest 6xxx series card, I think you'll see a _major_ improvement.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

Second the motion. My 6800 OC GT did pretty damned well with UT 2004, letting me run in highest res with details aaaaaallllllll the way up. It can also handle Morrowind Oblivion, in high-quality. But not ultra-high, sad to say, as it only has 128M on it.

[ewhac.livejournal.com]

The Nvidia 5xxx series were, for the most part, _crap_.

Wow. Not what I would have expected. I bought a 5900 some years back, and it seemed perfectly adequate given what I was trying to run on it. It also seemed to be right around the knee of the price/performance curve at the time.

Funny, though... I did notice that the 5900 seemed to disappear from the shelves shortly after I bought it, and all that were left were the crippled MX varieties, or the 512MiB GTX varieties that went for $400-500 each.

I have a 7900GT in my new rig, and seems to do a lovely job running Oblivion.

[velvet-wood.livejournal.com]

You can't trust the numbers on video cards, hon. I always take a cheat sheet with me when I shop for them. As for the chip... "Sempron" = "crippled". Seriously, the semprons are only fit for 'office' stuff, and no good at all for games. I would have gone for an Athlon 64 3200 or above, if I wanted to play things like Quake. :( Did you put it together yourself, or buy it already assembled? If the latter, you almost certainly got ripped off. You can always put together a better system (sometimes _much_ better) for the same price by buying pieces from NewEgg or a couple other places and putting them together yourself. Sorry.