my pentium d 940 is clocked @ 3.2 ghz and has a 800mhz fsb. i have it paired up with a geforce 6800gs (yes, i know, its old) and like a 400w power supply. im planning on upgrading my graphics card to an 8800gt or maybe wait till the geforce 9 series (february?) but i would like to know- if i just got an 8800gt right now, would it work at its full potential? wouldnt my pentium d bottleneck it? how much of a performance increase could i expect if i was to upgrade to a core 2 duo e6750 w/ the 8800gt over the pentium d?
It would bottleneck it, but currently I think your Graphics cards are the main concern. Also take into account the motherboard, I'm guessing your 6800 is AGP right? If so your going to need a new motherboard as virtually all new cards these days are PCI-Express. And most probably a new Core 2 Duo wouldn't fit into a Pentium D socket either.
And with that comes newer components, and etc, etc... your pretty much going to have build a new computer from scratch if you want to get the most of the 8800GT.
That being said:
I have virtually the same processor as you, with a 7600GT and 1Gb of RAM and I'm still getting along fine on games like Supreme Commander, NFS Pro Street and even Crysis.
Yours is pushing it but with some tweaking and overclocking maybe you could squeeze a little more life out of it.
Have you considered buying a cheaper mid-range card just for the short-term to keep your system going?
Some like an AGP 7800GS would suit your system well and wouldn't bottleneck it, they cost around $100. While giving you a little more life out of your rig.
I dont know much about video cards because im not a PC gamer. But if you want the core 2 CPU just look up the specs for your MOBO and see if it can handle the BUS Speed of your CPU. The sockets match. Good luck!
at 1440x900 and everything else off/low, i get around 29 fps. around 18 fps in the jungle areas.
yea, i think i will have to buy an upgraded card to squeeze some more life out of this pc. dont really want to spend any more money on it. its pre-built (Gateway GM5076E)
core 2 duo doesnt fit in my mobo, or else i wouldnt be asking this question. if it turns out that my processor is unacceptably slow compared to todays standards, then i would have to upgrade, meaning make a new pc from scratch.
im a bit wary of upgrading to quad core, as the least expensive (q6600) is almost $300 and quad core isnt exactly perfected/used in software right now. when most software is more quad-core alert, the prices would have sunk by then. Crysis doesnt use all 4 cores at once, instead, it uses all 4 of them one-at-a-time, so you might as well be using a dual core instead. the new 45nm wolfdale dual core processors are coming out next month (3GHz E8400 is $190)
i can wait a bit b/c i will have to find a job first anyways (im 17)
I run @ 1280x960, settings are medium to low, with textures and stuff at medium. I get around 35 FPS pretty solidly, expect for when the action gets a little to intense it can drop down to as low as 15.
My card is overclocked slightly tho but believe me there's still plenty of fight left in your rig, I've been managing just fine with most of the "next-gen" titles, you just gotta tweak your system.
As for QuadCore right now they give pretty much identical performance to as Core 2's do in most apps. Fact is it'll take a few months or more before software is specifically written for that stuff and even then it will be some time before it makes the most of it and it's fully optimized. So for now stick to Core 2's, their much cheaper and efficient.
The problem with our processors is they were the dual cores first on the market. Their micro architecture and coding were poorly written and they didn't make full use of all their pipelines.
That's why Core 2 Duo's are effectively twice as powerful as Pentium D's even though their running at lower freqs. Their coding has been revised and is way more efficient.
so i have a 400w power supply. do you think i should just keep this system for now and buy a mid-end graphics card when the geforce 9 series rolls out? wont my processor still bottleneck it?
ya thats what i thought at first was up with our pentium d's and why theyr so much slower than the core 2's- that they were simply the first dual cores out and hadn't been perfected, but it was just too simple. so knowing that, i guess the quad cores will be perfected in a few years as well.
just curious- we have dual core processors. if a game can only make use of one processing core at a time, how would dual core processors benefit the game? would one core work on the game itself and the other on all the background tasks?
