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LOSTCIRCUITS

UPGRADING, BUT WHERE TO START?
System too slow for your new games?

(Review by MS)

Almost everyone I know has, at some point, become annoyed by the fact that the PC he or she owned could no longer keep up with the requirement the game software industry is throwing at us (I am leaving out office applications on purpose here since even a 486 has enough horse power to run Excel spreadsheets). Games are running choppy and only at the lowest resolution is it possible to even play them, otherwise, the gaps between individual sequences become intolerable. The situation is exacerbated in LAN or online games where you can be dead before your computer even processes the information that there is an enemy shooting at you. I don't mean to promote violent games but some of these games like Unreal Tournament or Quake 3 Arena are actually fun.

So, you are unhappy with your system but buying a complete new setup exceeds the depth of your wallet. In a way, consider yourself lucky because there are ways to improve your system within a reasonable budgetary limit, particularly if you have one of these integrated solutions. While a few years ago, the CPU was the limiting factor in system performance, this situation has changed dramatically putting the burden on the video card. If you look at your own system, you should know that any CPU above 300 MHz should be able to handle almost any games. They may not be as fast as on your neighbor's machine but you can essentially do everything and play every single game on the market. What other system bottlenecks are there that hold your system in chains? The two main bottlenecks at present are:

too little system memory
an inadequate graphics adapter

Let's start with the first category

Windows98 requires at least 32 MB of system memory. This specification is almost ludicrous since, with 32 MB system RAM, even the fastest system will turn into molasses because every single execution of data will involve writes and reads to the hard drive. From my own experience I can say that 128 MB is the bare minimum for Win98 and increasing this amount to 256 MB will add, on average, another 10-20% in system performance.

Windows2000 requires 64 MB system memory but I can't even envision how a system featuring Win2K would run with that little RAM. Keep in mind that on a standard boot into Windows2000, the operating system will occupy a minimum or 110 MB of system memory, which are, therefore, blocked from being used by other applications. In a direct performance comparison, my old K6-266 system (Windows98, 64 MB SDRAM) beat a Dell 733 MHz system (Windows2000, 128 MB Rambus memory) in every single application. After upgrading the Dell system to 256 MB system memory, the old system had no more chance to keep up with it. 512 MB would have been better but that would no longer qualify as a budget upgrade.

Bottom line is, if your system has less than 128 MB of memory, you are going to see a substantial increase of performance simply by adding more. There is one caveat, though, which is that some older systems are not able of handling more than 64 MB system RAM. All mainboards featuring the Intel TX or VX chipset fall into this category. There are still enough of these systems out there which, in many ways are absolutely sufficient for almost everything. In that case, just stick with the 64 MB memory and don't use Windows2000

The second and probably more relevant bottleneck is the graphics adapter or video card. It has become common practice among computer manufacturers such as Gateway or Dell, to equip their system with Intel i810 chipset based mainboards, just as eMachines uses VIA or SIS chipsets and they all have one thing in common: Integrated Graphics.

Integrated graphics are, almost by definition, a low end solution. They work, using united memory architecture, that is, they use system memory instead of dedicated graphics memory. Just as an example, running Expendable on a 1 GHz Pentium III system will allow the game to run at an average frame rate (in benchmark mode) of over 100 frames per second (fps) but only when a real AGP card is used. If the integrated graphics adapter is used, a maximum of 30 fps can be achieved and for that, a Celeron 400 is sufficient.

Upgrading is, in some cases not that easy, since the Intel i810 chipset does not support an extra AGP slot. That means that any upgrade will have to be PCI-based. This may sound like an old fashioned interface, however, who has ever tried it, has experienced that the system performance was, at least doubled with the nice side effect of a much better image quality. In case one has one of the newer Intel i815-chipset based boards, the situation is actually much easier in that an AGP slot is there and any card can be used, including the highest performance cards like nVidia GeForce or ATI Radeon. In most cases, a GeForce MX, a 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 / Voodoo 5 5500 or a Matrox G450 will offer the best bang for the money with the 3 last mentioned being available also in PCI format for older systems. There is nothing comparable to a video card upgrade when it comes to the question of performance, trust me on this.

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