Howdy. I am considering an upgrade, but wanted to ask, if it would really improve performance.

I currently have a P4 1.8ghz with 400mhz bus speed. I also have installed 768mb of pc133 sdram.

I am considering upgrading the processor to 2.6 with the same bus speed, and the ram to 1536mb of also type pc133.

Would I see a significant difference in performance by doing both upgrades, or is just one or the other really necessary ? I am a gamer, I like to play WoW and Lineage 2, and I currently use an XFX 6600gt video card. Any comments would be greatly appreciated. :)

Voon

You should look into overclocking the CPU to get the most out of it and hold off till you are ready for a complete overhaul of your machine.

Overclocking is out of the question, and these 2 upgrades would run me about $260 dollars only. The CPU upgrade is the one im mostly interested in knowing if I would recieve a fairly large performance increase.

Im curious as to whether the bus speed of the processor and the ram is creating a bottleneck, or if that really matters too much. If not, would either of these upgrades be practical ?

Voon

It would make a diff in prefromance. As for a huge upgrade prob not, but a decent upgrade none the less especially if you through in the 6600GT with that upgrade.

If you plan on havign this pc for another 2 years then go ahead and do it. If you aren't a heavy gamer then do it.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ OC 2.7ghz
2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 7800GT
SATA II 2x 200gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

Adding RAM will only increase performance if you do not have enough now. Only you can determine if you are short on memory. Check your page file usage.

Do yourself a favor BACKUP!
Sorry, I do not check for private messages

Yes Cobra, I allready have the 6600gt installed, the motherboard uses the AGP architecture. I have been told, the processor I use now, is indeed creating the bottleneck, prohibiting the card from its maximumn potential, or maybe the card is indeed doing the job, but the pc is not fast enough to handle texturing, which I believe is what the computer chip handles in games of this type.

As for the ram, while playing one of the games, I use 500mb of it, while also having 2 browser windows open. I rarely use any other programs while gaming anyway, aside from Internet Explorer.

I appreciate all your comments, I will have to think about what I want to do. :)

Voon

Actually, I think your very slow RAM is more of a bottleneck than your processor is. Right now, getting a processor with a faster FSB would be pointless, since your RAM only ticks along at 133MHz.

Thank you jackbomb, I was wondering about that too.. Apparently, It seems imma have to do a complete overhaul including the board, cuz the RAM slots only support up to pc133 ram. Thanks guys !!!

Voon

Depends somewhat on what your doing with your machine. I have a 2gig cpu and in the summer I turn it down to 1.5 gig and to be honest I don’t really see any difference doing everyday tasks. The extra ram will do more than the cpu upgrade. To put it this way...if you upgrade your cpu a task that takes 3 seconds will take maybe 2 seconds. If your machine is fast enough now I wouldn’t waste the money.
Like one poster mentioned wait and do a major upgrade with a completely new machine.