Upgrades and framerates.

[shally]

Hi Everybody,
As you are probably all aware, an AMD Athlon 1400 doaesn't have the grunt to run FS2002 with settings high even with an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB card. ( Maybe because the mainboard is only 4X AGP capable and the graphics card is 8X?) My question is this. Will upgrading my system to a Pentium 4 2.8 800 front side bus with 8X AGP capable mainboard increase performance significantly? The various generic tests with other games on sites such as tomshardware.com suggest that even though the clock speed is doubled with such an upgrade, performance increase is only minimal. Is this the case with FS2002 and/or FS2004? By the way, my current system has 512MB DDR RAM.
Thanks for listening,
Stephen.

[thomastt]

how "big" a chip will the current mobo accept? i just went from an 1800 to 2400[2.0ghz] and did see a noticeable difference. this is with a geforce mx440{I KNOW!} get 13-17 fps landing at ksfo[ sliders 3/4 or full] ai at 89% VC, langclass scenery add-ons. if it'll take a faster chip, consider it. prices are CHEAP.tt

[bigal1977uk]

Hi Stephen,

The 4X AGP - 8X AGP is not the problem here........
All 8X AGP cards run perfectly well in 4X AGP, even by getting a mobo that will run in 8X AGP will only give you about a 2 - 5 % increase in performance ;-)

Like the above poster said, chips are cheap now but make sure your mobo can accomodate a bigger processor.

Also, this is not to everyone's taste, but have you tried overclocking the AMD 1400.....?

My chip was originally running at 1200mhz but iv'e overclocked it to 1600mhz, the AMD overclock really well aslong as there is sufficiant cooling and aslong as there is options in your bios to do this aswell.