I flashed the bios on my motherboard today & can now take a better processor I was wondering if it is worth it .
Currently I have a Athlon 64 3500 2.2 GHZ single core with 1 gig of ram.
I was thinking of getting a AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5200+ 2.70GHz (AM2)
& an extra gig of ram. I could get both for about £65 is it worth doing ?

If your motherboard supports this, I'm sure you should get some boost out of it.

I think the motherboard now supports upto a Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6000 3.0GHZ but this would set me back £70 just for the chip as opposed to £50 for the 5200 2.7 GHZ.
Is it a simple job just lifting out a AM2 chip & fitting a new one anyone done it ? Also with the new 5200 X2 & 2 gig of ddr2 pc420 533 mhz would my Geforce 7600 GT be the weak link in my system or is it not too bad still ?

Thanks
Neil

Yes, it's just to unclip the old processor, and inserting the new one.

I don't think you graphics board is anymore the weak spot, than the 533MHz RAM. Not sure what north bridge you're running either. Is this PCI-Express or AGP graphics?

But as for the price, I really think it should be worth it.

The motherboard supports faster ram speeds at least two grades faster. It is a PCI express graphics card.
Maybe I should buy faster ram then but it means buying 2 gig instead of 1. Will 1 gig of the faster stuff make my PC quicker than 2 gig of the slower or will I have to get 2 gig?
Really not sure which way to go at the minute, do the racing games rFactor,Arca etc rely heavily on the cpu or graphics or ram ? I don't want to spend a fortune but would like as much increase in performance as possible for a reasonable price.
Would buying 2 gig of faster ram give me more of a speed /fps increase in current games than buying a 5200 X2 dual core processor ?
Thanks for your help Morten

I can buy 2x 1 gig ddr2 PC2 6400 800 mhz for just over £20 & I was going to buy 1 gig of Pc2 4200 for about £14 so that would be a better choice I think.

With a processor change you will want to make sure you have a heat sink rated for the new processor, and get the thermal paste properly applied - this will make sure you get full boost from the new gear.

ARCA sure as h*** supports dual core. Just add +fullproc in the startup at the shortcut, has massive impact on FPS. Have no idea how much you'll gain by upgrading RAM speed, but dual core is great for ARCA and I think iRacing.

A strange thing happened last night I had been getting slight stutterings in rFactor despite the fps being high. SO I uninstalled the graphics card driver & downloaded the latest one.I then set it to Quality DX9 in the startup instead of DX7 performance,Then set all settings to maximum inc 16x attriscopic filtering all shadows max etc & it ran better than it did before at high settings with 2 x antistropic. FPS were 55 off the line then around 100 when the field split up & the game looked 10x better than normal. The tyres had a sheen to them & the track looked far better.
I think I will get 2 gig of fast ram 800 mhz to start with then may add a dual core processor after.

Okay, but I would go the other way. It's your money, so you decide

Maybe I will end up buying both !
If a game isn't optimized for dualcore & I bought a 2.2 ghz dual core would it run off one core at 2.2ghz so the same as my single core runs now ?
If so I will get at least a 2.7ghz dual core so at least I get an improvement if it is only running off one core.

No, you'll still benefit from dual core, as some of the windows tasks and applications will run in core2 and the game will only run in core1. But you'll still get more room in core1 for the game. ACtually I think it's more that windows will have to devide the load amongst the cores, so the game will not have full advantage of the different cores, but you computer will divide some load on both.

You'll probably gain the most from doubling your RAM from 1 to 2GB, but I don't think you'll notice much of the difference between 500 and 800MHz. But if you can run two chips at dual channel, you'll probably gain some, compared to mono channel today (if that's the case).

Just looked into the dual channel thing & found my motherboard supports dual channel it is a Asus m2npv vm
So opened the back up & the 2 sticks of ram were in the first 2 slots one yellow & one black. I read somewhere that they should be in the 2 yellow slots if you have two sticks 2 run dual channel so I swapped them into both yellow.
Should the ram now run faster & give me a slight performance gain ?

Thanks Morten this is like a computer learning course !

Yes they should work much faster now. On my system I get a message during boot, that my memory is working in dual channel. If I set them up wrong, I don't get that message.

They will now work in the same way as RAID HDD, the computer will only see one chip, with the size you have in total. So when it reads/writes it can do that on both chips at the same time, meaning it can read/write the same amount of data in half the time.

Thanks Morten I also opened task manager & noticed I had a lot of processes running I didn't even know about like bbc iplayer ,adobe updater etc I stopped these in startup & must have saved over 80 mb being used without me knowing ! I then set rFactor in the proceses priority to high I am getting better results now in game due to memory in right slots & more memory available etc.

Great. Not sure, but since the +fullproc command does take full advantake of dual cores, then maybe rFactor will too. The readme file explaining this is from rFactor, but it came on the ARCA disc.

I finally got 2 x 1 gig of DDR2 800mhz today to replace my 2 x 512 mb of 533mhz. I did a test first on rFactor at Oldring Jr international with F3's & changing the ram added around 8- 10 fps on average which isn't too bad & it only cost £24 I may add a new processor next when I get a bit of spare cash, I could also do with a new monitor still running a 10 yr old Tiny 17" CRT which my sis gave me !

That's not bad at all.

I resently replaced my 17"CRT with a brand new 22"TFT, I am actually faster on track now.

Morten wrote

I resently replaced my 17"CRT with a brand new 22"TFT, I am actually faster on track now.

Think it would take more than a new monitor to speed me up on track !

That's probably because you're faster than me as it is

Probably only works for slow drivers.