Question: What should I upgrade?

While playing Higher-end games like TrackMania (highest settings) and Source-Engine games (TF2, GMod, CSS is for losers) I can't quite reach an above-30 frame rate (highest settings) with these.

I am not too experienced when it comes to hardware, so if need be I can add more necessary details about the computer. Always wanting to keep my visuals as pretty as possible (and competition with another user on this forum), I know that there must be something that's holding my PC behind the rest of them.

I got this machine, custom-built, in the Christmas of 07-08, and the only thing is I can't open the case and install anything myself (not that I trust myself with it), or else I void some sort of warranty, by breaking shiny tape on the edges. Having the hard-drive wiped by taking it to a LAN party (musta jerked something loose; thank god for external drives), I feel like I might want to keep that.

Radeon X1650 Series
Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz
2.00 GB of 2.99GHz RAM
Windows XP Pro, SP3, 32 Bit

Like I said: If anyone has any suggestions on what to upgrade, and how to replace it, feel free to post something, as long as the price is reasonable.

What kind of motherboard do you have out of curiosity?

And imo, Nvidia graphics cards are the best in the market, and the majority of the games are made to run smoothly with Nvidia. try upgrading to one of those.

Umm, you're not allowed to open the case? What kind of weird company did you buy from? Apart from laptops and Macs, I haven't heard of a computer you weren't allowed to open. The fact that your internal hard drive got disconnected just by "jerking something loose" makes it pretty evident that you bought from a shoddy dealer.

The video card seems alright, not sure about the processor. You say 3ghz RAM? I wasn't aware that RAM could go that high. Are you sure about the accuracy of your specs? What about the RAM latency timings? You sure they aren't ridiculously high for some reason?

Shrike said:

And imo, Nvidia graphics cards are the best in the market, and the majority of the games are made to run smoothly with Nvidia. try upgrading to one of those.

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Baloney. Absolutely baloney. Unless you're looking for better drivers (or Linux support), ATI can still get the job done. The fact you didn't even state any kind of specific family or model gives further justification behind calling baloney on that.

FoxBlitzz said:

Umm, you're not allowed to open the case? What kind of weird company did you buy from? Apart from laptops and Macs, I haven't heard of a computer you weren't allowed to open. The fact that your internal hard drive got disconnected just by "jerking something loose" makes it pretty evident that you bought from a shoddy dealer.

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It gets the job done. And I don't have to do anything.

FoxBlitzz said:

The video card seems alright, not sure about the processor. You say 3ghz RAM? I wasn't aware that RAM could go that high. Are you sure about the accuracy of your specs? What about the RAM latency timings? You sure they aren't ridiculously high for some reason?

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Once again, I have little experience in computer hardware. What would be a more accurate number?

Shrike said:

What kind of motherboard do you have out of curiosity?

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It says Abit Fatal1ty on the box and when I start up.

supershadow2 said:

Having the hard-drive wiped by taking it to a LAN party (musta jerked something loose; thank god for external drives), I feel like I might want to keep that.

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How did you wipe the hard drive by carrying it to a LAN party?

Graphics card might need an upgrade, the processor I'd say is pretty bottlenecking here, Pentium 3GHz or not, it's a old processor.

My CPU is one I got on '07 and it runs TF2 and such fine, so I'd say if you got this thing custom built you probably could have done better. How much did you pay?

You'll want to get a better processor, which in turn means a new mobo and new memory (if the processor in question isn't the same socket). Multi-core is a must now; they're very cheap anyway. If you really want to spend, I hear the Intel i7 is amazing (or whatever their new core is).

After that, go video card. If you want something with excellent performance, nice support and a very good price, go for Evga's nVidia 9800GT. Be prepared for its size; a microATX case is not recommended (but possible) and in such a case you'd need to control the fanspeed manually otherwise it'll get quite a bit hot.

Finally, bump up to Vista (x64 even, if you want to use more memory) for the absolute optimal multi-core performance, but be ready to optimize where it is needed. I'd suggest reading TweakGuides' Vista guide.

http://www.tweakguides.com/ <-- check if you need any specific tweaking guides afterwards