I don't have a 4870, but from my experience I would say you could gain enough fps to play the witcher without dropping below the magic 30 fps line.After I upgraded to my 720 be from a 5000 x2 be (3.2) I am stable above 35 fps no matter which map. That's about 15 fps more than before.Same for mass effect. Ram would give you another boost, especially with bigger files being processed.pnjunction said:
Thanks for the info, I didn't realize the CPU was so limiting in this game. Thinking back it makes sense, every time I quit the game and look at task manager the CPU usage history is maxed out. Also explains why the GPU doesn't heat up much when I play this game (haven't checked with others this is the first I've played), it might not even be breaking a sweat.I might try cranking the AA up to 4x, if it's really CPU-limited it shouldn't make much difference. Might end up upgrading sooner than I had planned, oh well this trusty old setup will make a good torrent/fileserver box with my old 7900gs and 400W supply in it.SaSeba said:
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+Mobo: Asus M2N SLI DeluxRAM: 4x2GB PC 6400 DDR2 Dual ChannelVideo: 512 MB Nvidia 9800 GTX+HD: 250 GB SeagatePSU: Ultra 600WHDTV: 26" Samsung HDTVSound: Software High Definition AudioChassis: Antec 900OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 64 BitPlan on getting a Phenon X4 one of these days and a sound card. At least I don't have to worry about RAM. 
CPU: Intel Core 2 2,33 GHzRAM: 4 GBHD: 450 GBOS: Vista BusinessVideo: GeForce 9600 GS
Just got myself one Palit GTS250 1Gb, and replaced it's noisy cooling system with an Arctic-Cooling Accelero S1 Rev. 2 and 2 Scythe Kaze Jyu Slim fans, and it now looks like this :evil:Also overclocked my CPU from 2600MHz to 3120MHz.Here are the performance Before and After pics.
Nice overclock!! Care to share the bios settings?How's that Solo, btw? Those suspended hdd mounts must be decreasing noise quite a bit.
these are mostly motherboard related i think, so results may vary, my MSI K9A2 CF-F is rather pickysoSaSeba said:
.O.T setting: General 15% ( proprietary feature i think, will not even boot with this disabled on any OC )Cool'n'Quiet gets disabled anyway HyperTransport - 4xBus - 260MHzMultiplicator - 12xMemory settings - 5-5-5-15Memory freq - 1040MHz ( these A-Data deliver more than you'd expect )CPU Voltage - 1.34V ( you need 1.3V just to get 3GHz )Memory Voltage - 2.3V
yep, having rather quiet drives helps toounfortunately one of those drives is actually heavier than the other, althought they're the same series, they look a bit different on the electronic side, the motor part at least, so the top suspension ended up being loosened after an year, now it basicaly lowers the drive position by 2cm, strange, for now i've switched drives aroundi could just replace the loosened one with the middle one that was never used, but it must be displaced from the unseen part of the drive cage, where all the cable management part is, so i'd have to untagle all the wires there, and i'm not really in the mood for now, maybe in my easter holiday i'll find some timeSaSeba said:
just a quick remainder, guys and gals, do clean out the dust from your systems at least once a month!