What is my bottleneck?

Question

I find (as far as I'm aware) I've got rather poor performance in most games I try to play.
I'm just curious what you think is the bottleneck of my system;

Q6600 Quad @ 2.4Ghz
GTX275 - 897MB
-
4GB DDR2 @ 333Mhz
Vista 32Bit
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Could the 3GB+ memory & Vista be causing it all?
Would getting Windows 7 to use all my RAM have a noticeable performance impact?

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I'm kay with PCs, so can overclock anything that needs be. Already disabled any unnecessary start-up programs etc.

Answer 1

It is most definitely your RAM. I do not think that DDR2 33MHz memory is manufactured, the lowest clock speed is 400MHz. Given this, you might actually have DDR memory.



Regardless, your bottleneck is memory. If you have built your computer then you should know about your motherboard specs and be able to purchase a compatible higher clock speed memory type. Otherwise, check with your manufacturer or visit http://tinyurl.com/memoryconfigram and search your system to find the correct type of memory for your system.



I have a Q6600, GTX 260, 3GB of 800MHz RAM, Windows 7 and my system preforms well with all games at 1920x1200. Upgrading to Windows 7 does slightly decrease the idle memory usage but overall your system should preform just as well on Vista.



EDIT: Your clock speed is 333MHz though you claim it to be DDR2 but lowest frequency of DDR2 manufactured is 400MHz. Therefore, this could further decrease the speed of your system if the memory is actually DDR not DDR2.



EDIT: For 64/32-bit systems a 64-bit system will handle large amount of memory more effectively than an 32-bit system. The main reason to upgrade to a 64-bit system is memory management. If you are like 95% of computer users a 32-bit system that is limited to 4GB of memory is more than acceptable even for gaming. The speed increase of a 64-bit system is small if you have 4GB of memory or less. A downfall of 64-bit systems is compatibility and finding 64-bit drivers for your software can become quite a pain. So for your system 4GB of DDR2 memory is more than adequate.



EDIT: Yes, I would recommend buying new memory. It will mostly likely speed up your system to what it is capable of.

Answer 2

in case you have a processor that's better than quickly adequate for a game, and your pics card is consequently the limiting element, then you're being bottlenecked by your GPU. What bottlenecks what relies upon on the game, in spite of the undeniable fact that. In Crysis, regardless of an HD5800 sequence card, you're rather much truly GPU bottlenecked, except you have a ridiculously unfavourable processor. In TF2 or L4D, you're rather much truly going to be bottlenecked by your processor as long as you have an impressive video card.

Answer 3

4GB DDR2 @ 333Mhz ????? that sucks big time, you sure that isnt a typo? you need like 1066 mhz



if you download win 7 64bit from a torrent you can install it using the CD key you already have, perfectly legal



its still the ram, give the motherboard model and ill suggest what you should have.



@ Dave Suggesting that he change his whole motherboard to fit an AMD instead of an Intel is silly.

Answer 4

Any CPU with a clock speed below 3.0GHz will be a huge bottleneck for games. Games don't use multiple cores. You'd probably make a tremendous difference if you replaced that Q6600 with a AMD Phenom II X2 555



Again, games only use one core. Some few games are multi-core aware. But even for those, a fast dual core CPU performs much better than a slow quad core processor.



As for the 32-bit RAM limit...

If you do ctrl/alt/del, launch task manager, and check your percentage of physical RAM usage...you will note that this number never exceeds 1.3GB...and that the paging file (virtual memory) is not in use. Don't take my word on that, verify it yourself.

Bottom line, anything beyond 2GB of RAM is wasted, as that area of RAM (beyond 1.3GB) will never be used. And upgrading from 32-bit to 64-bit won't change that.

Answer 5

whats graphics card



and first i would get windows 7 64 bit (you will notice a speed increase)



then upgrade mobo and ram so you have some ddr3 running however 775 socket is a bit old that would mean cpu upgrade but its up too you