Simviation Forum - Questions about my computer

Aug 17^th, 2003 at 5:08am

deadnight Offline
Colonel
Georgia, USA

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Posts: 166

I know alot of stuff like this has been getting asked lately. I'm planning on upgrading my computer soon. I don't know enough about computers to know exactly what to upgrade. I had my computer built by Gateway about 2 years ago. About an hour ago I was chatting with a gateway tech person on the net. Man that guy was useless! I told him I was interested in a new processor and possibly a new motherboard.. and or any other components that I don't know about that would effect system performance. After I told him I wasn't concerned about memory he suggested I add more ram. Then he said I should look around the gateway website for motherboard information. If I knew what the hell I was doing I would have just done that in the first place! ARGHH!

Anyways, I have a feeling my computer isn't running its fullest potential. Like their might be a bottleneck in the system. Any suggestions for upgrading are welcome

Here's the basic specs.. and advanced specs are below.

-----------------------------------------
-Processor- Intel P4 1.4 ghz
-RAM- 768 mb rambus
-Video card- Gforce 4 ti 4600
-Motherboard- Intel (Monterrey) - 1.4-GHz R0
-OS- windows xp home addition
-------------------------------------------

I hope this isn't too much. I don't mean to spam up the forum. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Remember I'm kind of a newbie to the hardware side of things.

*EDIT* I removed the long list of system information.

« Last Edit: Aug 17^th, 2003 at 11:21pm by deadnight »

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe &&Geforce FX5900 Ultra(256 MB)&&1 gig DDR PC3200 RAM&&Pentium 4, 3.0 GHZ, 800 mhz FSB&&Coolermaster 550 watt power supply&&----------------------------&&<-3dmark03 =

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Reply #1 - Aug 17^th, 2003 at 7:14am

Silent Exploder Ex Member

i don't know exactly,but your motherboard seems to be the bottleneck. and your CPU ain't the fastest,too.

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Reply #2 - Aug 17^th, 2003 at 9:15am

deadnight Offline
Colonel
Georgia, USA

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Posts: 166

I've been running some benchmarking tests and it seems that most computers with the same processor I have are running better than mine.

Now If I can find a motherboard that can handle dual 3 ghz P4's...... Cheesy

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe &&Geforce FX5900 Ultra(256 MB)&&1 gig DDR PC3200 RAM&&Pentium 4, 3.0 GHZ, 800 mhz FSB&&Coolermaster 550 watt power supply&&----------------------------&&<-3dmark03 =

6535

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Reply #3 - Aug 17^th, 2003 at 1:25pm

Silent Exploder Ex Member

a dual-P4-board would be quite useless,because most games (except Quake 3) don't use both of the CPUs.

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Reply #4 - Aug 17^th, 2003 at 3:53pm

swanny338 Offline
Colonel
Switched from PC to Mac
and loving it
Houston, Texas

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unless hes using the computer for something else. One of my friends built a dual xeon 1.8 Ghz server. He was running an Americas Army server on it. its only on an 8Mbit connection in Canada, and i get a 200 ping on it with 25 other people playing at the same time. and 8Mbit is not a great connection...

Still have a nice PC but I just switched to a hella nice mac

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Reply #5 - Aug 17^th, 2003 at 7:11pm

deadnight Offline
Colonel
Georgia, USA

Gender:
Posts: 166

Ok, I'll scratch the dual processor then.. maybe. I was looking at some asus motherboards and they don't seem to have any newer models yet for dual processors. I'm really liking the looks of the p4c800 deluxe. I would have to switch over to sd ram though. put a 3.2 ghz p4 in their... Cheesy

I can live with different ram. hehe The reason I got rd ram in the first place is because I read it is suppose to be much faster than normal ram. but for some reason It's getting kind of hard to find in stores.

The computer is mainly for audio recording and gaming. Nothing else really. A fast connection from the soundcard to the HD is a must. Right now I have a western digital hooked to an ati card. I was told scsi was the way to go but I don't know anything about it. seems kind of expensive too.

Thanks for the info.

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe &&Geforce FX5900 Ultra(256 MB)&&1 gig DDR PC3200 RAM&&Pentium 4, 3.0 GHZ, 800 mhz FSB&&Coolermaster 550 watt power supply&&----------------------------&&<-3dmark03 =

6535

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Reply #6 - Aug 17^th, 2003 at 9:07pm

Iroquois Offline
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Happy Halloween
Ontario Canada

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You have quite a bit of information here. You need to condense it down.

Is Rambus the only memory your board accepts? The Rambus Company claims their RDRAM is the fastest on the market. Truth is DDR2 is much faster and it has been said that RDRAM isn't as good as tired and tested PC133.

Processors have come down significantly in recent years. Get the highest one your board can take

I only pretend to know what I'm talking about. Heck, that's what lawyers, car mechanics, and IT professionals do everyday. Wink

&&The Rig: &&AMD Athlon XP2000+ Palomino, ECS K7S5A 3.1, 1GB PC2700 DDR, Geforce FX5200 128mb, SB Live Platinum, 16xDVD, 16x10x40x CDRW, 40/60gb 7200rpm HDD, 325w Power, Windows XP Home SP1, Directx 9.0c with 66.81 Beta gfx drivers

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Reply #7 - Aug 17^th, 2003 at 10:33pm

swanny338 Offline
Colonel
Switched from PC to Mac
and loving it
Houston, Texas

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btw that friend of mine spent 500 on just the mother board Shocked

Still have a nice PC but I just switched to a hella nice mac

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Reply #8 - Aug 17^th, 2003 at 11:20pm

deadnight Offline
Colonel
Georgia, USA

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Posts: 166

Before I bought the computer I did alot of research on memory. I must have read at least 5 articles that said RD was better than SD. Never saw anything about it being the other way around. but then about 6 months ago I went to circuit city to get more ram and they only had 2 sticks left. The guy told me that would be the last RD ram they will ever carry at that store. I thought it was kind of odd since it was suppose to be better than SD ram.

Sorry about the long list of information. I was hoping somebody that is very good with hardware could point out exactly what would be causing any kind of performance problems. I agree, I'm going to modify it and get rid of most of it.

I'm afraid to actually change motherboard and/or processor myself. I'm not sure If I would trust Gateway to do it for me either. They are just like any other computer company, advertise the processor speed and the ram but don't tell you about the details that makes the processor and ram pointless. I'm almost concidering selling my computer and buying a new one from Monarch computers. (http://www.monarchcomputer.com/) ; That company is mentioned on the Nvidia website. They are based close to me in Atlanta GA. I think I could put more trust in a small buisness PC company than a large corporate company like gateway or dell.

Anyways, thanks for the information.

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe &&Geforce FX5900 Ultra(256 MB)&&1 gig DDR PC3200 RAM&&Pentium 4, 3.0 GHZ, 800 mhz FSB&&Coolermaster 550 watt power supply&&----------------------------&&<-3dmark03 =

6535

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Reply #9 - Aug 19^th, 2003 at 3:39pm

Ivan Offline
Colonel
No, I'm NOT Russian, I
only like Russian aircraft
The netherlands

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is it a homebuilt or a pre-made one?

If it's pre-made, lots of things can be set much higher in the BIOS, but be carefull with that

#1 Update the BIOS, this can make it both faster and more stable
#2 DMA mode drivers for the same, see the Intel website for that

checks you can do in BIOS
- DMA mode for both IDE controllers, switch to AUTO
- AGP to 4x
- AGP Fastwrite can be switched on if it doesnt go beserk
- Check your mem speed against the speed setting in the BIOS(if you have that setting)

Videocard is good enough and new enough to support AGP fast writes

Russian planes: IL-76 (all standard length ones), Tu-154 and Il-62, Tu-134 and An-24RV&&&&AI flightplans and repaints can be found here

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Reply #10 - Aug 20^th, 2003 at 12:25am

deadnight Offline
Colonel
Georgia, USA

Gender:
Posts: 166

Thanks for the reply Ivan.

I have recently tried to udate the bios. I followed all the directions but when I boot the computer up with the floppy with the bios information on it it says 'error, not a system disk, remove and reboot'.

I read through the FAQ for the bios update and it said it would say this if I wasn't using an ibm pre formated disk.. which by coincidence is exactly what I was using.

I can't figure out what to do about that.

I've been doing alot of reading about the bios.. but I can't figure out how to get into it to change settings. I've tried hitting F2 on startup, that brings up some information about the system for changing drive boot order and password.. f4, f7 and f8 don't seem to work either. I'm not sure how to get into it.

The computer was some-what custom built for me by gateway. I really didn't know enough to specify alot of it but I told him what ram, os, processor and basic hardware I wanted.

Thanks again. I appreciate it.

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe &&Geforce FX5900 Ultra(256 MB)&&1 gig DDR PC3200 RAM&&Pentium 4, 3.0 GHZ, 800 mhz FSB&&Coolermaster 550 watt power supply&&----------------------------&&<-3dmark03 =

6535

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Reply #11 - Aug 20^th, 2003 at 4:07am

Ivan Offline
Colonel
No, I'm NOT Russian, I
only like Russian aircraft
The netherlands

Gender:
Posts: 6058

You need to use the old Win98 bootdisk (if you still have one)

or download the floppy image from here

Write the image to the floppy, copy the BIOS writer and the BIOS file to it and reboot.

To get into the BIOS... as it seems to be a Intel MOBO(long time ago that i used one... all ASUS now) it's probably the 'Delete' key, but i've also read that CTRL-ALT-ESC does something

If you get in the BIOS,
this site gives some advice which can be usefull. and if you don't know what a setting does leave it how it was as default, that will never hurt

Russian planes: IL-76 (all standard length ones), Tu-154 and Il-62, Tu-134 and An-24RV&&&&AI flightplans and repaints can be found here

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Reply #12 - Aug 20^th, 2003 at 5:44am

deadnight Offline
Colonel
Georgia, USA

Gender:
Posts: 166

The BIOS is now updated and tweaked as good as it will let me.

My BIOS sucks! I can barely change anything. Only 1 thing mentioned in that bios tweaking article I was allowed to change.

Time for a new motherboard Undecided

And a processor to go along with it Grin

Thanks alot Ivan. You where very helpful.

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe &&Geforce FX5900 Ultra(256 MB)&&1 gig DDR PC3200 RAM&&Pentium 4, 3.0 GHZ, 800 mhz FSB&&Coolermaster 550 watt power supply&&----------------------------&&<-3dmark03 =

6535

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