• 5450 with a Sempron 3200+ and Gmod ?
    14 replies, posted
I know its a ridiculously bottlenecked system but my friend wants to upgrade his system so he can play Gmod at a playable framerate. Hes only got a Nvidia 6200 intergrated gpu atm which hardly plays it. I was thinking if I got him a AMD 5450 and some more ram hed be able to play Gmod on atleast med-high settings? Hes got a Sempron 3200+ clocked at 1.8 GHZ. He plans to upgrade the CPU later to something a little nicer but for now its just gonna be the ram and GPU. Currently hes only got 512 so he definitely needs a 2GB upgrade. Would he atleast get above 40 FPS with the card and the ram combined? At the moment he can barely use it. Its running XP and is just cripplingly slow to the point where it takes a good 15 minutes to boot (Sounds like his HDD is full to the brim or hes got tonnes of viruses) so the ram should help out with that. Thanks!
Eh. If you want a GPU that can actually pay off, a new psu might be in order, and then again it would bottleneck everything else. It's pretty much hopeless. Leave it be and let him buy a new one - spending money on upgrading old hardware just isn't worth it.
All together I can do it for like £45. The PSU is like £15. My bro has one in his system and it works fine and I have had one in my system for ages and it hasn't given me any trouble so it should be good.
Don't expect anything more than medium settings with how Garry's Mod works right now
The problem here is the Sempron. The Athlon 64 arch doesn't run modern iterations of the Source engine well, even if you put the most powerful GPU that would work in the motherboard, since Source is primarily a CPU bound game. The RAM is going to help that system far more than the 5450 will. I've owned a few Athlon 64 systems and none of them ran Source well, no matter what configuration changes I made to them. But there are a few console commands you can run to give a somewhat decent frame rate boost: mat_bumpmap 0 (turns off normalmaps) mat_specular 0 (turns off cubemapping and fixes bugs from disabled normalmaps) mat_motion_blur_enabled 0 (disables motion blurring, this can give drastic framerate boosts, especially on older hardware)
See the problem is Gmod 13 iv tested on some rigs. Pentium 4 3.6Ghz socket 775, and 2Gb 400Mhz ddr and a 7300GT 512mb, with a 80gb sata. it ran like shit. on DX8.1 bearly playable online. im getting better frame rates with this shitty laptop, spec: T7200 core 2 duo 2Ghz, 4gb ddr2, x1300 128Mb, dx8.1 source games are very playable. it seems very cpu intensive so i suggest minimum dual core. also another rig i test on is a Pentium Dual core 3.4Ghz, 2gb 1066Mhz GEIL, 9600GT 512mb, 8600Gt physx. still lags on high.
[QUOTE=butered_toast;40331299]See the problem is Gmod 13 iv tested on some rigs. Pentium 4 3.6Ghz socket 775, and 2Gb 400Mhz ddr and a 7300GT 512mb, with a 80gb sata. it ran like shit.[/QUOTE] The 7300GT is a shit entry level card that is stomped by the last gen 6600/6800 series. If you got a higher end 7x00 card like the 76/78/79xx, Gmod would run markedly better. It would still be severely limited by the garbage Netburst arch (Pentium 4), but it wouldn't run at slideshow rates.
[QUOTE=bohb;40337399]The 7300GT is a shit entry level card that is stomped by the last gen 6600/6800 series. If you got a higher end 7x00 card like the 76/78/79xx, Gmod would run markedly better. It would still be severely limited by the garbage Netburst arch (Pentium 4), but it wouldn't run at slideshow rates.[/QUOTE] I have a 7300GT in my closet.. 8600GT was a huge improvement. I agree.
[QUOTE=bohb;40337399]The 7300GT is a shit entry level card that is stomped by the last gen 6600/6800 series. If you got a higher end 7x00 card like the 76/78/79xx, Gmod would run markedly better. It would still be severely limited by the garbage Netburst arch (Pentium 4), but it wouldn't run at slideshow rates.[/QUOTE] When I had a system failure, the only CPU I had that I could use was a Pentium Prescott 3.0 GHz and even when partnered with a GTX275 GMod wouldn't go about 9fps. Maybe there was something else off but I still don't think 9fps is playable.
[QUOTE=rhx123;40338582]When I had a system failure, the only CPU I had that I could use was a Pentium Prescott 3.0 GHz and even when partnered with a GTX275 GMod wouldn't go about 9fps. Maybe there was something else off but I still don't think 9fps is playable.[/QUOTE] You must have been doing something wrong. I have a P4 3.2 box with 2 GB RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro, it can manage 20-40 fps if tweaked properly. But this assumes you aren't on a huge map that is horribly optimized.
[QUOTE=bohb;40351365]You must have been doing something wrong. I have a P4 3.2 box with 2 GB RAM and a Radeon 9800 Pro, it can manage 20-40 fps if tweaked properly. But this assumes you aren't on a huge map that is horribly optimized.[/QUOTE] Maybe the chip was faulty, but when I plopped a C2D in (no other hardware as changed) the frame rate shot up to what it should have been, so it couldn't have been an OS issue or other hardware. Although it was on bigcity so maybe the optimisation was bad as you suggest.
gm_bigcity is about the worst map you can try to run on older hardware lol. The CPU was probably like "the hell is all of this world geometry, fuck this" and gave up.
Why did you guys all quote what i said. I said the 7300gt was Shit. It was shit. So don't take it out of context. Bare in mind that's a rig I recieved for free in my computer repair workshop, it was alright and fun playing older games. My overall point was don't go for older gpus unless its 8000 series+ or ATI 4k+ and minimum dual core. All picked up for pennies nower days
Upgrading something that old is just not worth the money at all, better to save up and get something decent.
[QUOTE=Chryseus;40371788]Upgrading something that old is just not worth the money at all, better to save up and get something decent.[/QUOTE] Couldn't agree any more :y
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