The Ideal CPU and Motherboard

A couple of years ago, when it was released teh 3800 was considered a good card, as with all things techy though its probably fairly average now ie will run all 1 year old games on high settings and most new games on at least medium. Unfortunately without knowing anything else about your comp I can't really tell, there is a lot more to gaming performance than just the graphics card. Do you know your processor and RAM?

Sorry, that came out wrong, when I said average I mean good but old, very similar performance to my graphics card in fact

thats san sweet rig u have there relic

Quote :

thats san sweet rig u have there relic

Thanks I'm very happy with it, it plows through everything I throw at it :p

Hey r3lic, here is a thinker for you. I may have a software conflict as well hardware issues. I was playing last night with an fps of 72 and I was still experiencing a lag. Do you think it could be a ram issue? Any suggestions where to focus? I have always done registry cleans and removed programs as required. I am coming to the conclusion that I am going to have to wipe my hard drive and start again. It has been a year since I last did it. I don't really want to do this because I never get the computer back to the way it was before and it would take ages to reinstall everything including patches and updates. Going to be a while untl I have the £700 available

Hmm thats interesting. Do you have the nVidia control panel installed? It could be that some of the settings are conflicting with in game settings. Also have you tried playing single player to see if its still laggy? Finally try reducing all the graphics to low and work through them one by one, turning them back on to try and see if you can find the cause of the problem.

Let me know how it goes and I'll keep thinking

hi r3lic all i can find is- intel(r)core (tm) 2 duo cpu, e4500@2.20ghz, 2.20 ghz 2.00gb ram. mb,asus p5v-vm se dh. dont realy know wot it all means . can play cod brill all settings high. cheers p.

sorry been meaning to post this as i dint think the your rig was causing graphics problems as you could record videos in x fire i try that and my rig craps its self but runs bf2142 smooth.

i would also check your internet connection mate, i can remember you saying in the past you had problems with it also make sure you have no programs running in the back ground especially ones that might be using the net.

Have tried it on singleplayer mode and it is mostly okay. Nothing like the multiplayer games i have been having recently.

I would say my internet connection is good. Downloads stuff very quick. People talk about opening ports etc. Never fully understood how to do this or whether it is necessary.

As to programs running in the background Well you know how it is all these programs upload alittle something to your registry when they are installed and i have always done my best to remove or disable the non essential sneeky buggers.

I cant think of anything else that might be doing it But I do feel there is something going on. Not sure what.


Last night playing on camp gibralter with 16 players a side all playing in the same bit of map...fps was anything from 30 to 78 but it was always

sluggish and a bit slow to respond you know what it is like...you move the mouse, and computer is like "huh.......you moved the mouse?..........

sorry......okay.......there we go."


Of course by that time you have been shot, skinned and eaten. I dont mind losing to (and being skinned and eaten by) the better man, but I hate it when you know your reactions were fine but your computer let you down i.e. got the perfect ambush go to Pilum someone up the arse and end up shooting the moon!

I could carry on whinging but ......

with the registry there's never much point looking in there for performance issues, its kinda like a defrag only works in certain issues.

the reason i asked about other programs is maybe they were stealing ram or bandwidth from you.

with opening ports that may help you.

how this works is when your router receives a signal it doesn't know what computer asks for it, so it will do a broadcast basically send a message to every pc tell ones reply s saying that's for me then it it will send the info on, as you can see this causes a slight delay.

what port opening does is it tells the router when ever you receive a signal on this port send it to this ip, removing the need for the broadcast and reply.

might be worth a try i will hunt down the ports for you. and if you need help doing i can walk you through it over teamspeak.

do you run a wireless internet connection? or wireless anything on your pc?

also open up task manager click process and tell me what the cpu usage and memory usage is like when you pc is idle

By the sounds of it it's an internet issue, if it runs fine on single player and is laggy on multiplayer then it suggests that there is something up with your connection to the servers. Your ping is usually pretty low which means its unlikely to be anything like torrents downloading in the background etc. Could be a port issue, it's not too difficult to open ports, you just have to know which ports you need open and what router you have (each router has their own GUI and works in slightly different ways).

As Crack says its unlikely that registry would cause a problem however there is a great program called Registry Mechanic which I use which cleans up your registry, its really good and would be especially useful if you haven't formatted your computer in a year (I usually format mine every 6 months or so to keep it running super quick).

Other than that I'm not quite sure, did you say you had the nvidia control panel or similar installed? Again with single player being OK it suggests its more an internet issue but I guess conflicting settings could cause it...

yea totally agree with r3lic if your ping is low then it wont be an issue with wanother program takeing bandwith.

got the ports of the ea site

TCP Ports:

* 80
* 443
* 4711
* 9960-9969
* 1024-1124
* 17475
* 17567
* 18000
* 18060
* 18120
* 18300
* 18510
* 27900
* 28910
* 29900

UDP Ports:

* 9964
* 16567
* 1024-1124
* 1500-4999
* 18000
* 18300
* 18510
* 27900
* 27901
* 28910
* 29900
* 55123-55125


oh and to get into your router gui in the web address type 192.168.1.1

it will ask you for username and password if you hvant set this just search the net for your routers defaults one

Cheers Crack for the info about my router. Always suspected it was somerthing like that. However, i have never done anything about it in the past and it used to work fine. Saying that I appreciate the advice and will try anything to improve my comps performance.

cpu usage on idle in task manager is anything between 1 -17%

I have my suspicions about I tunes although nothing proven

I keep the amount of programs on startup to a minimum and regularly check this on msconfig

I have wirless but my router is hardwired to my pc via an ethernet connection. My wife`s and my iphone are able to use the router via wifi but only do it when they told to.

Cheers R3lic;
I have nvidia control panel but I have the settings set so the game decides rather than the panel.

However, The two graphics cards i have 9800 gt have an sli bridge but SLI is not enabled because the computer doesnt give me the option to.

Have looked online and the only reason I can find is that this might because the graphics cards are different models even though they are both geforce 9800 gt (if you no what i mean). I didnt buy them at the same time. One is 6 months newer than the other and doesnt require a power lead.

However, again, it has worked better in the past.

Thanks alot for your input so far.

Interesting, perhaps try to take one of the cards out and run them individually to see what happens.

Do you use the nVidia control panel? I don't have it installed because I find it always creates more problems than it solves. Windows can usually pick up the drivers automatically.

I wouldnt have thought iTunes would cause a problem (I don't have it installed so can't really say) but you could always uninstall it to test, stranger things have happened

I can't imagine it being a CPU or RAM issue, the FPS is high which suggests the comp is playing the game fine but having problems somewhere else.

no probs mate just hoping we can get this fixed for you,

1-17% completely normal so thats all gd.

i couldn't comment about i tunes as i will not touch anything apple (personal preference) so have never used it, but i wouldn't be surprised that its sending info on a regular basis back to them so try turning it off when your gaming.

with you being hard wired that's gd so it wont be lag between your pc and router. also do a wee test and shut off your anti virus and firewall to see if there causing problems.


oh and in the router when you open the ports also tell the router to give you pc a specific ip as every time you turn your pc on it will get a new one.

your right with the cards they must be the exact same for sli to work, to be honest you would be as well as removing one as its doing you no good having it anyway.

your right r3lic nvidea panel tend to be a bigger pain than help in most cases. it does help me with some issues but

Quote :

i will not touch anything apple (personal preference)

Haha, I'm the same, they make some good products but the company is far too restrictive.

lol they so are like microsoft want to control everything you do with something you pay for. they used to be hippy company as well for there customers back in the day.

i would have to say there products are not that good just hyped up and over priced you basically pay a hell of a lot extra to look cool with an apple logo.

i can rember when the i pod was out everyone was going on about how good it was,me being a pc geek went with creative a company thats been doing that shit for years not just new to it, i let them listen to it and even they had to admit the sound quality was much better had a bigger hard drive oh and was cheaper

The iPhone and iPod have both made very positive impacts on their markets. Without the iPhone I wouldn't have my Palm Pre which is such an amazing phone. However the iPhone has started to fall behind now and they desperately need a new OS because the current one is feeling very old.

As for the iPod as you pointed out, they have aweful sound quality. Its amazing how an mp3 player with such bad sound quality outsells every other mp3 player put together. It makes no sense to me, why buy a music player that has bad sound quality I've got a Sony atm and they really are one of the market leaders at the moment.

As for the computers, they are all very average, and as you say overpriced.

I have to stop now, I could go on all day about what a twat Steve Jobs is but I won't.

One final comment:

iPad

the only reason they succeed is the amount of money ploughed into advertising to make it cool to have one they were never meant for people who actually want a good product.

you are right about the i phone, i have the G1 which probably wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the iphone.

and your right we better stop ibashing it could go on for a very long time lol

but i will leave you with the best version of the ipad i have seen.

Unfortunately I have a few things of my own that may just trump you :p

The true iPad:

http://photos-f.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs148.snc3/17578_564634987667_286603847_3999017_7264489_n.jpg

A parody made 3 years ago, long before the name iPad was even properly conceived. Funny how Apple is using something that people mocked them with!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1010049615274470573&hl=en#

that vid was brilliant and lets face it thats where apple prob got the name form

i seen that pic as well i do like it and the funny thing is thats all the ipad is lol

Where do I type the ports into? what ranges? Do I enter all of the ports or just two?

As to your apple rants my lovelies

Agree about the Ipad. Its just a larger i phone with no apparant performance advantages.

As to the other stuff cant argue with your fear of apple taking over the world. but you have to understand that their products work very well ergonomicly and practicly. there is very little fucking about as you would with a PC.

Now i love my pc and will never own a Apple mac but my iphone is brilliant.

You can have your other phones and love them to bits, thats cool, i dont mind but my Iphone is brilliant.

You can show me all the parodies in the world but my IPhone will still be brilliant .

I had a various types of sony mp3 walkmans up until last year which were fine but I got pissed off with the sony software, which was rubbish (worse than Itunes by a huge margin and definetly worse for tying you into shit) fortunatly I was able to replace it with a far more......brilliant product.....my iphone!

The sound quality isnt a problem for me with a decent stereo and amp and a high bit rate. Love the apps, love the useability, love it.

I have to say that people arent just being mindless sheep by buying apple, there is a reason behind it fellas. There you go, just providing a little bit of balance.

What do you think about the screenshot above ( it is my wifi router) where do I go from here. Of course if I have offended your sensibilities by my apple betrayal then i withdraw everything i said.....my iphone sucks arse, I hate touchscreen, apps are shit, steve Jobs is a jobbie.

love you guys please help me.....

Sorry, I've done port opening but Crack would probably be better to advise you.

As to the iPhone backing, I'll just point out that I did single out the iPhone as a good product which has moved the market forwards It is a great product, however the UI hasn't changed for 3 years and will most likely get an update this year

As to the usability, you are quite right, iPods sold because of the easy to use UI but nowadays they have become more of a fashion accessory than anything.

Finally, Sony have completely scrapped their useless software and you can now use any program you want Except for iTunes of course, because Apple won't allow that :p

Lol

certainly a fashion accessory for some people but thats cause it is popular. I have to say it is nt about fashion for me but then these things tend to snowball.

As to sony. Up until last year I had always bought sony from walkman tape players, hi fi, mini disc to mp3. I tried two different mp3 from sony over four years but i can say my iphone is so much better just more rounded.

As to sony`s current mp3 well it may be excellent thats cool. sony still rock in my book for quality and customer support.

Thanks for all the advice so far R3lic. Definetly will be upgrading my PC this year with your help. Cheers mate