Questions about my computer

[deadnight]

I know alot of stuff like this has been getting asked lately. I'm planning on upgrading my computer soon.

[ATI_7500]

i don't know exactly,but your motherboard seems to be the bottleneck. and your CPU ain't the fastest,too.

[deadnight]

I've been running some benchmarking tests and it seems that most computers with the same processor I have are running better than mine.

Now If I can find a motherboard that can handle dual 3 ghz P4's......  :D

[ATI_7500]

a dual-P4-board would be quite useless,because most games (except Quake 3) don't use both of the CPUs.

[swanny338]

unless hes using the computer for something else. One of my friends built a dual xeon 1.8 Ghz server. He was running an Americas Army server on it. its only on an 8Mbit connection in Canada, and i get a 200 ping on it with 25 other people playing at the same time. and 8Mbit is not a great connection...

[deadnight]

Ok, I'll scratch the dual processor then.. maybe. I was looking at some asus motherboards and they don't seem to have any newer models yet for dual processors. I'm really liking the looks of the p4c800 deluxe. I would have to switch over to sd ram though. put a 3.2 ghz p4 in their...  :D I can live with different ram. hehe    The reason I got rd ram in the first place is because I read it is suppose to be much faster than normal ram. but for some reason It's getting kind of hard to find in stores.

The computer is mainly for audio recording and gaming. Nothing else really.  A fast connection from the soundcard to the HD is a must. Right now I have a western digital hooked to an ati card. I was told scsi was the way to go but I don't know anything about it. seems kind of expensive too.

Thanks for the info.

[Iroquois]

You have quite a bit of information here. You need to condense it down.

Is Rambus the only memory your board accepts? The Rambus Company claims their RDRAM is the fastest on the market. Truth is DDR2 is much faster and it has been said that RDRAM isn't as good as tired and tested PC133.

Processors have come down significantly in recent years. Get the highest one your board can take

[swanny338]

btw that friend of mine spent 500 on just the mother board  :o

[deadnight]

Before I bought the computer I did alot of research on memory. I must have read at least 5 articles that said RD was better than SD. Never saw anything about it being the other way around. but then about 6 months ago I went to circuit city to get more ram and they only had 2 sticks left. The guy told me that would be the last RD ram they will ever carry at that store. I thought it was kind of odd since it was suppose to be better than SD ram.  

Sorry about the long list of information. I was hoping somebody that is very good with hardware could point out exactly what would be causing any kind of performance problems. I agree, I'm going to modify it and get rid of most of it.

I'm afraid to actually change motherboard and/or processor myself. I'm not sure If I would trust Gateway to do it for me either. They are just like any other computer company, advertise the processor speed and the ram but don't tell you about the details that makes the processor and ram pointless. I'm almost concidering selling my computer and buying a new one from Monarch computers. (http://www.monarchcomputer.com/)  That company is mentioned on the Nvidia website. They are based close to me in Atlanta GA. I think I could put more trust in a small buisness PC company than a large corporate company like gateway or dell.

Anyways, thanks for the information.

[Ivan]

is it a homebuilt or a pre-made one?

If it's pre-made, lots of things can be set much higher in the BIOS, but be carefull with that

#1 Update the BIOS, this can make it both faster and more stable
#2 DMA mode drivers for the same, see the Intel website for that

checks you can do in BIOS
- DMA mode for both IDE controllers, switch to AUTO
- AGP to 4x
- AGP Fastwrite can be switched on if it doesnt go beserk
- Check your mem speed against the speed setting in the BIOS(if you have that setting)

Videocard is good enough and new enough to support AGP fast writes

[deadnight]

Thanks for the reply Ivan.

I have recently tried to udate the bios. I followed all the directions but when I boot the computer up with the floppy with the bios information on it it says 'error, not a system disk, remove and reboot'.

I read through the FAQ for the bios update and it said it would say this if I wasn't using an ibm pre formated disk.. which by coincidence is exactly what I was using.

I can't figure out what to do about that.

I've been doing alot of reading about the bios.. but I can't figure out how to get into it to change settings. I've tried hitting F2 on startup, that brings up some information about the system for changing drive boot order and password..  f4, f7 and f8 don't seem to work either. I'm not sure how to get into it.

The computer was some-what custom built for me by gateway. I really didn't know enough to specify alot of it  but I told him what ram, os, processor and basic hardware I wanted.

Thanks again. I appreciate it.

[Ivan]

You need to use the old Win98 bootdisk (if you still have one)

or download the floppy image from here

Write the image to the floppy, copy the BIOS writer and the BIOS file to it and reboot.

To get into the BIOS... as it seems to be a Intel MOBO(long time ago that i used one... all ASUS now) it's probably the 'Delete' key, but i've also read that CTRL-ALT-ESC  does something

If you get in the BIOS,
this site gives some advice which can be usefull. and if you don't know what a setting does leave it how it was as default, that will never hurt

[deadnight]

The BIOS is now updated and tweaked as good as it will let me.

My BIOS sucks! I can barely change anything. Only 1 thing mentioned in that bios tweaking article I was allowed to change.

Time for a new motherboard  :-/  And a processor to go along with it  ;D

Thanks alot Ivan. You where very helpful.