- Joined
- Jul 9, 2010
Hey everyone,
This is my first post. This seems like a really great community - I made a recent similar post in the AMD forums, but these seem like a much better choice -- much better and more active, so if you've seen the crosspost to the other forum - sorry! Also, if this is the wrong subforum to ask this question, please let me know.
I've recently bumped into an obnoxious problem. I built this pretty modest gaming computer last year to play games with my younger brother and some of my friends. My prior computer was not speced out to play games, so I'm not really used to how this is supposed to go -- perhaps I've made a mistake somewhere, I'm not sure. I thought performance with my card was OK but then when a friend saw it (who has a similar card) he was shocked at the performance, especially considering the low resolution I run at. I'd really appreciate any help anybody can offer me.
Here are the specs:
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-US2H (using stock F3 bios)
AMD Phenom II x4 810
HIS Radeon HD 4850 1g
4 GB of ram (2 2048mb sticks running at 800MHz (i thought that they might have been 1024 MHz sticks but if I change that in BIOS the system wouldn't boot. i just left it alone. bios says Unganged mode)
I bring up the RAM just because that's the only thing I'm "unsure of" in the system. However, certain games run really well. I played Oblivion, Bioshock, and Trine with good performance at 1360x1024 on high settings. I don't game any higher as I have an old 20" CRT.
When recently playing L4D2 I was surprised as when I played the game at 1360x1024 with high settings the game didn't run well, noticable choppiness. I bumped down the resolution to 1152x864 and it played great, although at a lower resolution. I didn't really think much of this until I started playing GTA4 and had to play it at 1024x768 on medium settings in order for it to be playable -- this made me feel like something must be wrong, and that I need to take a look at my system.
I decided to run a Passmark benchmark, receiving a score of 1199. I know benchmarks are meaningless, but I wanted to use it to see a measure of what I was observing as bad performance. It was when I compared my computer by using a computer with my same card and cpu that I was shocked by the results.
The other user overclocked their cpu, but my CPU still performed better in many areas. When I go to the 3d graphics mark tab though, I was shocked to see him outperforming me by nearly 100% in every category.
3dGraphics Mark (1524.2 him, 754.2 me), Graphics 3d - simple (1970.9 him, 830.4 me), Graphics 3d - medium (690.2 him, 441.1 me), Graphics 3d - Complex (70.5 him, 32.6 me)
I'm running xp64 and he's running vista 32-bit, we have different motherboards, and that he's using 4 sticks of 1gb 1024mhz ram as opposed to my 2 sticks of 2gb 800mhz ram, but we've got the same gpu with the same vram, and the same cpu. His ram performed better than mine in Read, Read uncached, and Write categories by about 40%, but our overall "memory mark" scores are pretty close. And the RAM doesn't seem like that would be what's making such a huge difference in 3d performance, does it?
Thanks for reading this behemoth of a post. Just wondering if there's anything that I might not have tried, or might not be aware of. I'm using the most current drivers. I built this computer as a way to stay in touch with my younger brother, who went off to college recently. I do enjoy playing games, but I don't have a need to play Crysis at a killer resolution. I'd just like to have fun and play the games where they look good -- I don't need to have some kind of "pro gaming rig" or anything. I would, however, like to feel like I got a bang for my buck -- and if my graphics card is performing at what appears to be 50% of what it should, I find that pretty annoying.
I was, however, thinking of upgrading the monitor to an LCD, where I'd NEED to run my games at a higher resolution. And if my performance is noticably subpar on l4d2 at just 1360x1024, I need to resolve this issue first.
Thanks so much for reading the post, and thanks for the help.
This is my first post. This seems like a really great community - I made a recent similar post in the AMD forums, but these seem like a much better choice -- much better and more active, so if you've seen the crosspost to the other forum - sorry! Also, if this is the wrong subforum to ask this question, please let me know.
I've recently bumped into an obnoxious problem. I built this pretty modest gaming computer last year to play games with my younger brother and some of my friends. My prior computer was not speced out to play games, so I'm not really used to how this is supposed to go -- perhaps I've made a mistake somewhere, I'm not sure. I thought performance with my card was OK but then when a friend saw it (who has a similar card) he was shocked at the performance, especially considering the low resolution I run at. I'd really appreciate any help anybody can offer me.
Here are the specs:
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-US2H (using stock F3 bios)
AMD Phenom II x4 810
HIS Radeon HD 4850 1g
4 GB of ram (2 2048mb sticks running at 800MHz (i thought that they might have been 1024 MHz sticks but if I change that in BIOS the system wouldn't boot. i just left it alone. bios says Unganged mode)
I bring up the RAM just because that's the only thing I'm "unsure of" in the system. However, certain games run really well. I played Oblivion, Bioshock, and Trine with good performance at 1360x1024 on high settings. I don't game any higher as I have an old 20" CRT.
When recently playing L4D2 I was surprised as when I played the game at 1360x1024 with high settings the game didn't run well, noticable choppiness. I bumped down the resolution to 1152x864 and it played great, although at a lower resolution. I didn't really think much of this until I started playing GTA4 and had to play it at 1024x768 on medium settings in order for it to be playable -- this made me feel like something must be wrong, and that I need to take a look at my system.
I decided to run a Passmark benchmark, receiving a score of 1199. I know benchmarks are meaningless, but I wanted to use it to see a measure of what I was observing as bad performance. It was when I compared my computer by using a computer with my same card and cpu that I was shocked by the results.
The other user overclocked their cpu, but my CPU still performed better in many areas. When I go to the 3d graphics mark tab though, I was shocked to see him outperforming me by nearly 100% in every category.
3dGraphics Mark (1524.2 him, 754.2 me), Graphics 3d - simple (1970.9 him, 830.4 me), Graphics 3d - medium (690.2 him, 441.1 me), Graphics 3d - Complex (70.5 him, 32.6 me)
I'm running xp64 and he's running vista 32-bit, we have different motherboards, and that he's using 4 sticks of 1gb 1024mhz ram as opposed to my 2 sticks of 2gb 800mhz ram, but we've got the same gpu with the same vram, and the same cpu. His ram performed better than mine in Read, Read uncached, and Write categories by about 40%, but our overall "memory mark" scores are pretty close. And the RAM doesn't seem like that would be what's making such a huge difference in 3d performance, does it?
Thanks for reading this behemoth of a post. Just wondering if there's anything that I might not have tried, or might not be aware of. I'm using the most current drivers. I built this computer as a way to stay in touch with my younger brother, who went off to college recently. I do enjoy playing games, but I don't have a need to play Crysis at a killer resolution. I'd just like to have fun and play the games where they look good -- I don't need to have some kind of "pro gaming rig" or anything. I would, however, like to feel like I got a bang for my buck -- and if my graphics card is performing at what appears to be 50% of what it should, I find that pretty annoying.
I was, however, thinking of upgrading the monitor to an LCD, where I'd NEED to run my games at a higher resolution. And if my performance is noticably subpar on l4d2 at just 1360x1024, I need to resolve this issue first.
Thanks so much for reading the post, and thanks for the help.
