long story short, you have a slower quad core.  yes the cpu usage is 50%, but its because its running maxed on 1 or 2 cores, the fps is low because it needs a faster cpu core to run on and isnt able to make use of the quad, aka its a choke point for the game.

so you can either oc the cpu, upgrade it to a faster one, or tweak the games cpu using items down lower and watch fps go up.

8 gigs of ram is good, mmos love ram, and from the looks of your post you have 2 480 gtx in sli so you should be good there.

1 other diagnostic to try after messing with cpu intensive game settings, would be to turn sli off, age of conan hated sli when it came out, and the funcom made that too.

Originally posted by neorandom

long story short, you have a slower quad core.  yes the cpu usage is 50%, but its because its running maxed on 1 or 2 cores, the fps is low because it needs a faster cpu core to run on and isnt able to make use of the quad, aka its a choke point for the game.

 

so you can either oc the cpu, upgrade it to a faster one, or tweak the games cpu using items down lower and watch fps go up.

 

8 gigs of ram is good, mmos love ram, and from the looks of your post you have 2 480 gtx in sli so you should be good there.

 

1 other diagnostic to try after messing with cpu intensive game settings, would be to turn sli off, age of conan hated sli when it came out, and the funcom made that too.

Great advice, thanks. Will look into new CPUs (although I'm afraid that might lead to a new motberboard, too, but let's see).

I don't have SLI, only one 480gtx (dual-monitors, though). Will that become a problem then? If so, might as well built from scratch;)

Originally posted by Chingo

Great advice, thanks. Will look into new CPUs (although I'm afraid that might lead to a new motberboard, too, but let's see).

I don't have SLI, only one 480gtx (dual-monitors, though). Will that become a problem then? If so, might as well built from scratch;)

Nah, the graphics card is still fine, a single 480 is still a good card and can max out any game.

But a worrying thing more is the FSB speed, the speed that your CPU and memory speak with eachother. Your card only support 1200 mhz and that is a bit of a bottleneck. You want 1600 mhz or even 1800.

Now am I not sure exactly how fast your memories can go, it might well be that they are good enough so you just can exchange CPU and motherboard, but chances are that you want some faster there as well. They usually have a max speed number or at least model number on them so you can see how good they are.

A third good upgrade is getting a SSD as system drive, it wont help your FPSbut will cut down all loading times to close tozero.

My recommended list of upgrades:

1. New CPU and motherboard. The Intel 2700K is nice for an acceptable price. Get a board that supports at least FSB 1600.

2. Faster memory. Might not be needed, can't tell by DX.diag since you or one might be able to operate faster than you run them.

3. SSD as system drive and for installed games.

Originally posted by Mike-McQueen
I'd probably overclock first and see where that takes you. Also upgrading to a 580gtx would help immensely.

No it wont. A 680 would be a good upgrade but the 580 is not so much faster that it is worth the cost unless you can get it really cheap qand you wont..

The 680 is still hard to find but it will be easier any week now.

Besides, the 480 is a good card as long as it don´t get too hot.Keep it well ventilated in a large case and it will run excellent.

Originally posted by Loke666

My recommended list of upgrades:

1. New CPU and motherboard. The Intel 2700K is nice for an acceptable price. Get a board that supports at least FSB 1600.

2. Faster memory. Might not be needed, can't tell by DX.diag since you or one might be able to operate faster than you run them.

3. SSD as system drive and for installed games.

Thanks. I'll try overclocking first just to see if that affects anything. Then your 1.-2. are my TODO list to fix things up. Can't remember my memory speed but it definitely not very fast by today's standards. It's a relief if I don't have to up the gfx card right now. Would rather wait until the prices of the new cards come down a little. SSD's are still so pricey that I've been putting it off so far and probably will do so for a little longer.

Second the SSD for gaming.  Picked one up and it is really nice.  I bought a fast little 60 gb corsair.  Small but enough for win7 and a game.  It was only around $100.00.  I just wanted to try it out and it is very nice.

Also, do you think you can get anymore out of your OC?  I would definitelly try that first.

Originally posted by Chingo.

Thanks. I'll try overclocking first just to see if that affects anything. Then your 1.-2. are my TODO list to fix things up. Can't remember my memory speed but it definitely not very fast by today's standards. It's a relief if I don't have to up the gfx card right now. Would rather wait until the prices of the new cards come down a little. SSD's are still so pricey that I've been putting it off so far and probably will do so for a little longer.

Yeah, I have the same card myself, it is good for another year.

As for SSDs a good 120 Gb is around $120-$150 depending on where you get it. You will keep your old drive for movies, music and stuff, and for that matter games that don't need fast loading speeds.

If you have your OS and top priority games like TSW and GW2 on the SSD they will be really fast and starting your computer will only take half the time. It will also be cooler.

SSDs are not a must since they only help when you load but most MMOs still have loading screens at times so they are nice to have. You don´t have to replace all your drives with SSDs, 95% of my ram is still in SATA drives.

Originally posted by slowpoke68

Second the SSD for gaming.  Picked one up and it is really nice.  I bought a fast little 60 gb corsair.  Small but enough for win7 and a game.  It was only around $100.00.  I just wanted to try it out and it is very nice.

Also, do you think you can get anymore out of your OC?  I would definitelly try that first.

OCd by 20% via BIOS (and tweaked NVidia settings towards performance) and now I'm standing in the same spot in TSW with ~10fps more which admittely is pretty far from the scientific method but maybe we're onto something. The client also started crashing which is either because of the tweaks or the new patch I had to download;) With a PC built by yours truly however I'm not too comfortable with turning every knob beyond the legal limit. I think I'll have to create a distraction to the wife and go shopping next week:)

I think neorandom knew what he was talking about, too, as looking at the loads on the cores it shows clearly 2 of them being much higher (up to 70-90%).

Originally posted by Chingo

OCd by 20% via BIOS (and tweaked NVidia settings towards performance) and now I'm standing in the same spot in TSW with ~10fps more which admittely is pretty far from the scientific method but maybe we're onto something. The client also started crashing which is either because of the tweaks or the new patch I had to download;) With a PC built by yours truly however I'm not too comfortable with turning every knob beyond the legal limit. I think I'll have to create a distraction to the wife and go shopping next week:)

I think neorandom knew what he was talking about, too, as looking at the loads on the cores it shows clearly 2 of them being much higher (up to 70-90%).

YEah, he did.

Most MMOs only works on 2 cores. Funny enough seems GW2 to support all my 6 cores (first time I really had use of my hexacore I got 2 years ago). Even some MMOs that do support 4 cores have eneven load and put more into 2 of the cores.

But many newer games do support 4 cores so dual cores really are getting faced out now even if they still performs good in many MMOs. MMOs tend to be a bit nehind FPS games, probably because of the long time it takes to make them.

Dude you are playing an open beta on a stress test weekend - the frame rate will be shocking.  What is the performance like on say Skyrim, WoW, TOR or BF3?

8gb of ram is fine, and really getting ddr3 wont see much of an improvement, however would be needed if you change your mobo.

GFX cards are fine - even 1 is excellent

CPU is a little slow, but not really a game breaker

Biggest issue i think here is the game itself unless you are seeing these massive drops in lots of games.

Your CPU though would be the 1st thing I would upgrade - It is just a little long in the tooth.  Looks like you have the same board as mine so im guessing you have 8gb of DDR2 @ 800mhz.  If i was going to upgrade and i only played games I would be looking at the 2500k/3570k new mobo and memory (this is so cheap would maybe consider sticking in 16gb @ 1600)

Your GFX cards really are fine I would think for another 12months at least so wouldnt bother there.

P.S. to this thread as a courtesy to the helpful people and others wanting to hear about people's upgrade experiences.

To summarize, my problem was low framerates without a clear bottleneck and I was told (correctly) that probably the CPU speed (at level of individual cores) together with memory speed limited by the motherboard was a culprit. 

One thing led to another and by selecting a new CPU I realized I need a new MB and of course memory. So I went with that with the philosophy that I won't pay top money for the components but "enough" (I do have a family to think about). 

I made the following upgrades (well it's practically a new PC I built but anyway):-

• Motherboard
  • Old: ASUS P5N-T DELUXE
  • New: ASUS P8Z77-V LX
• CPU
  • Old: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad  CPU   Q8200  @ 2.33GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.5GHz
  • New: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz
• Memory
  • Old: 8MB of some slow stuff (can't remember how slow)
  • New: 12GB* from Corsair running @ 1,6GHz

• Everything feels faster from OS boot to using apps in general.
• Am finally able to max all Gfx settings in all games I've tried which I wasn't able to do previously (e.g. Deus Ex, Skyrim).
• Just to give some concrete fps numbers from trying out online games, LotRO jumped up to 100+ fps while turhing all gfx settings to max (which I wasn't able to do before)  and AoC in Tortage also improved to around 50 fps (again, while turning all settings to max) . 
• In general, I'm a better person overall and women are much more interesteed in me including my wife. Ok, that might have been just a dream I had the other night...

Originally posted by neorandom

long story short, you have a slower quad core.  yes the cpu usage is 50%, but its because its running maxed on 1 or 2 cores, the fps is low because it needs a faster cpu core to run on and isnt able to make use of the quad, aka its a choke point for the game.

 

so you can either oc the cpu, upgrade it to a faster one, or tweak the games cpu using items down lower and watch fps go up.

 

8 gigs of ram is good, mmos love ram, and from the looks of your post you have 2 480 gtx in sli so you should be good there.

 

1 other diagnostic to try after messing with cpu intensive game settings, would be to turn sli off, age of conan hated sli when it came out, and the funcom made that too.

I'm running an AMD 9850 (2.5x4) and TSW had all 4 cores pegged(the first game to do so).  I just wrote it up as a beta thing and let it go.  Seems strange that it would fully use an AMD CPU but leave an Intel chip on cruise.

With that, 8 gig 1066 memory, and an ATI 5770, I was pulling between 30-62 FPS @1080P most of the time, with some occasional dropouts in the police barricade.

May sound strange OP, but you might consider an SSD drive.  Maybe you're getting alot of hitching with the unoptimized beta build.

Edit:  read your last response.  If you think LotRO is cooking now, wait'll you get an SSD.  That game has some major hitching issues, and an SSD makes them barely noticable. 

Hope your new build works well with TSW!  Have fun! 

Originally posted by Robsolf

May sound strange OP, but you might consider an SSD drive.  Maybe you're getting alot of hitching with the unoptimized beta build.

Edit:  read your last response.  If you think LotRO is cooking now, wait'll you get an SSD.  That game has some major hitching issues, and an SSD makes them barely noticable. 

Hope your new build works well with TSW!  Have fun! 

Agreed. When it comes to MMO performance SSDs help tremendously. Zones, sub-zones, player and mob textures are typically loaded from disk on the fly as needed.

The more open the world is, the more HD or SSD access this means since predicitve memory caching doesn't help as much if the game doesn't have a solid idea about where you'll go next.

I would rank the importance of components for MMO performance in this order: GPU > CPU > Disk > RAM > everything else.

Ram IS important but we often obsess over it too much. Its importance grows if you're OCing the CPU by a lot but even then the differences are minor between sticks of ram that often cost twice as much. Just like Windows Ultimate is usually a waste of $$. so is the super-duper ram.

Originally posted by Iselin

Originally posted by Robsolf

May sound strange OP, but you might consider an SSD drive.  Maybe you're getting alot of hitching with the unoptimized beta build.

Edit:  read your last response.  If you think LotRO is cooking now, wait'll you get an SSD.  That game has some major hitching issues, and an SSD makes them barely noticable. 

Hope your new build works well with TSW!  Have fun! 

Agreed. When it comes to MMO performance SSDs help tremendously. Zones, sub-zones, player and mob textures are typically loaded from disk on the fly as needed.

 

The more open the world is, the more HD or SSD access this means since predicitve memory caching doesn't help as much if the game doesn't have a solid idea about where you'll go next.

Thanks. SSD is definitely the next item on my shopping list. Just waiting for a good deal (I want to get a big enough SSD to store both my active games and my SDKs but without having to cancel the family summer vacation plans to be able to pay for it;). 

1) You need motherboard + CPU

   For gaming needs  you can get i5 2500K and if you have video editing needs go for i7 2700K.

for pure gaming u dont need anything more than i5 2500K the CPU is bets optimised for gaming.

i5 is pretty cheap.

2) If you have more to spend then u can go for graphic card upgrade but thats a bit dicey as you might have to change the power supply also.

When i was short on cash I just bought a reburbished ATI 5850 card on ebay and crossfired it on my computer and it running amazing in full detail.

If you can afford get a used GeForce GTX 480 cheap and put it on SLI mode.  It will give you value for money.but again for SLI modes u will need new power supply units.

Originally posted by Chingo

Originally posted by Iselin

Originally posted by Robsolf

May sound strange OP, but you might consider an SSD drive.  Maybe you're getting alot of hitching with the unoptimized beta build.

Edit:  read your last response.  If you think LotRO is cooking now, wait'll you get an SSD.  That game has some major hitching issues, and an SSD makes them barely noticable. 

Hope your new build works well with TSW!  Have fun! 

Agreed. When it comes to MMO performance SSDs help tremendously. Zones, sub-zones, player and mob textures are typically loaded from disk on the fly as needed.

 

The more open the world is, the more HD or SSD access this means since predicitve memory caching doesn't help as much if the game doesn't have a solid idea about where you'll go next.

Thanks. SSD is definitely the next item on my shopping list. Just waiting for a good deal (I want to get a big enough SSD to store both my active games and my SDKs but without having to cancel the family summer vacation plans to be able to pay for it;). 

I'm not sure what exactly you're waiting for, but depending on how much capacity you need, there are plenty of good deals available today.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226236

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148443