System bottlenecks

M

MrG

New member
Old system:

Intel Pentium 4 3.0 Ghz LGA-775 Prescott 530 (single core)
nVidia GeForce GTS250 512MB Graphics Card (Running on PCI-E 16x v1.0 slot)
2GB DDR667 RAM (Dual Channelled - @533)
Gigabyte 8I915P Duo Motherboard.

This setup (Mobo, ram, cpu) I bought in 2004. just changed the ram around.. originally had 512MB DDR400.. then eventually changed it few times to end with 2x 1GB DDR2 667 sticks.

Now this setup lasted me a long long time. I had a 7600GT in the setup before I put a GTS250 inside.. now its rather clear that with a GTS250 there was a serious bottleneck.

I am curious to discuss what would cause the largest bottleneck for the system. I heard the PCI-E 16x 2.0 revision isnt really needed for performance increases as 1.0 doesnt have the bandwidth used by a GTS250 so therefore my conclusion comes to just the slow 533 ram and single core processor.

This really does mean applications (gaming) are becoming a lot more CPU heavy. World of Warcraft WoTLK struggled to run on that machine for what I would assume is just pure CPU bottleneck. Presence of a GTS250 did not make a difference.

However I am thinking still CPU may not actually have been the main bottleneck.. but that is what I am here for. What do you guys think?
 
If you would be able to upgrade to a C2D cpu, you would see a huge performance bump, but I am not sure that mobo would support it. Don't even know if you want to upgrade, but if so, post an estimate budget here and you would get some great suggestions.

I would say, if you are on a tight budget, look for an G43 chipset mobo and a E5300 cpu, this would give you a nice boost for now and then you can just upgrade the ram at a later stage.

Hope this info was useful. :D But yeah, your cpu is the biggest bottleneck, unless you are still running and IDE 5400rpm drive. :p
 
HDDs are also big bottle necks always, regardless of if you are running on 5400rpm or 7200rpm. Good SSDs are the only way to get rid of these hard drive bottle necks. I used to have a big bottle neck before i got my ssds in raid0, even with my 2x 500gigs in raid0 before.
 
jasong said:
lol right frank - so he should get an SSD instead of oh say a QUAD CORE CPU?
Click to expand...

That is not what i am saying! I am just saying that once the cpu etc is upgraded then you must def look at upgrading the hard drives. A ssd will not help much at all if you dont have a good enough cpu, mobo, ram or even a gfx card. Just chill.
 
I am mostly wondering what would have been the largest bottleneck. The machine has currently been converted to a media centre machine running a low spec graphics card in place of a GTS250.

I am surprised applications have actually moved forward using that many cores these days. I remember back in the day when multiple cores made little to no difference and even 64bit back when AMD had it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top