Upgrade questions

[Varun]

Hi everyone,

I want to upgrade my current system because it has performance issues in Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO).

Current system:
Phenom 9500 2.2GHz
Asus M2N-E
6GB DDR2 800
Radeon 4850 512MB
Samsung Spinpoint 250GB drive
Vista 64

I get horrible frame rates in LOTRO (5-30). I used to have an 8800GTS 640MB video card which recently died and was replaced with the 4850 and the frame rates are 100% the same, indicating I am CPU limited. I also get a lot of paging pauses because this game has a lot of large textures it pulls from the hard drive.

I need to upgrade my CPU, and I have two options. I would like some feedback on the choices.

Option 1:
Upgrade to a Phenom 9950 (2.6GHz) + Velociraptor 300GB - slightly higher CPU frequency + a much faster hard drive to help with paging stutters. This is the less expensive option

Option 2:
Upgrade to E8500 Wolfdale (3.16GHz) + Asus P5Q Pro + Velociraptor 300GB - much faster CPU even though it is dual core, but the drawback is I have to buy a motherboard and reinstall my OS, and obvioulsy a higher price.

I am really leaning towards dumping the AMD because frankly it sucks at gaming and the times I use all four cores are few and far between.

Does anyone have any feedback on any part of this? Thanks!

 

[DSF]

You have 6GB of RAM and the game has to refer to the hard drive that often? Sounds like a poorly written game if it's true.

If you don't use all four cores, Intel sounds like the way to go.

 

[Varun]

I guess I have to explain the paging better - the world is huge and as you run around it has to load textures for all of the new areas you are moving to. It's not paging the hard drive because it is using the swap file. Sorry for that.

 

[Denithor]

Have you discussed your performance with other players to see what kind of hardware they're running for acceptable performance? I would personally hate to dump a chip/mobo for another set only to find no real improvement in fps.

Also, you might be running into a frame buffer problem, what resolution do you play at? If you turn it down a bit does your fps get better? Perhaps a GTX 260 (896MB) or 4870 1GB card would make more sense than a new CPU.

And if you can hear it grinding away on your hdd while loading new areas, one thing you could consider is going with one of the faster SSDs, either the MLC from Intel or an SLC from one of the other makers.

How big is the installed game on your hdd?