View Single Post - New and wanting advice

BeerCheeze · Rated XXX

Hi Blodflekk, and welcome to the site.

My first thought is your system seems pretty good, with only your video card standing out to me. It's a good card, but the 9600's are a more "value" card and were never top of the line. So with that in mind, I'd focus more there than on the CPU in your system.

Here is a pretty good article on overclocking your card: http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=729 and as you'll see he was able to get just over a 20% gain in performance.

One thing to keep in mind, is when you overclock you are going to be producing more heat and could shorten the life of the product being overclocked. So be very careful here and make sure you have good airflow in your case and that you keep your video card cleaned off (compressed air works best here).

If that isn't quite enough you could overclock your CPU, but I'd suggest tweaking the graphics settings in the game and lowering them a bit. Try lowering things like AA if it's on, textures are another place that can be lowered to help performance, and possibly lowering the resolution.

If you want to OC your CPU there are a couple of good threads here to read through:

http://www.bigbruin.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=14564

http://www.bigbruin.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12904

And last but not least, you can always consider a video card upgrade. Personally I'd recommend looking at an ATi 4890 simply because it offers the best bang for the buck right now, with the ATi 4970 close behind. Careful shopping can get a 4980 for under $200 US, and a 4870 under $150 US.