I upgraded my Video Card...

[giorgio]

I went from an ATI Radeon X300 SE HyperMemory with 128mb to:
ATI Radeon 4850 1Gb

So far, I haven't notice any improvement, maybe it did but I'm not sure.

I upgraded because lately I've been reading, searching, comparing a lot of info, products, tutorials, forums, about a lot of things like photography, movies, facebook, trucks, etc. so I end up with more than 120 open firefox windows(mostly tabs ofcourse).

I haven't yet done any photo editing nor graphic design.

The compu pauses for moments specially when loading a website.
Then I also have a movie playing/streaming at a side, and it also pauses for instants when the compu starts doing something else(like loading a website).

I have 4Gb in RAM, Pentium 4 Duo 3Ghz.
And I thought that my 128mb video card could be a bottle neck, so I upgraded.

I'm planning to buy like 1100usd of Photography equipment in the next 6 days so spending 110usd on something not needed is not a good idea.
I could keep the new video card thinking is going to be more helpful when editing and designing.

Meanwhile I'm looking for some performance tests programs I could do to my new Video Card and then to the other one, for comparisons.

I could try also by installing the drivers in another way or directly running the CD setup, instead of letting Windows do the installation itself pulling the drivers from the CD.


Any of you have any opinions or experience on this?


:thumbsup:

 

[usayit]

What makes you think your video card is the bottleneck?

 

[usayit]

.

The compu pauses for moments specially when loading a website.
Then I also have a movie playing/streaming at a side, and it also pauses for instants when the compu starts doing something else(like loading a website).

In other words... how is the above behavior indication of a bottleneck in the video?

Looks to me like you bottleneck is network related. Pauses in loading a website can be a slow DNS resolution. Slow streaming indicates throughput or bandwidth issues on the line.

Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test

 

[inTempus]

What operating system are you running? If you have Vista or Windows 7 it has a built in speed test.

Do you have a Pentium 4 or a Core 2 Duo? If you have a Pentium 4 it's really kind of a slug these days. I have one that I replaced with a Quad Core system and the speed difference is night and day. The Pentium 4 is very slow by today's standards.

Fire up your Performance Monitor in Windows and open the application(s) you're noticing a slow down in while running them. See if the CPU is peaking out.

Also, keep in mind that if you have a browser open and one or more of the pages you're viewing has a good sized flash app running, this will hog system resources.

 

[giorgio]

.

The compu pauses for moments specially when loading a website.
Then I also have a movie playing/streaming at a side, and it also pauses for instants when the compu starts doing something else(like loading a website).

In other words... how is the above behavior indication of a bottleneck in the video?

Looks to me like you bottleneck is network related. Pauses in loading a website can be a slow DNS resolution. Slow streaming indicates throughput or bandwidth issues on the line.

Speedtest.net - The Global Broadband Speed Test

Because is not the website's loading that pauses/interrupts, is the PC that doesn't responds for instants(mouse doesn't move, etc.) because is proccessing all the data and applications running.
Specially when I open a new window or new tab, and it has to display/render the website layout and stuff.

The movie doesn't interrupts either because of its loading, it already has a lot of loaded buffer ahead.

Internet speed is ok.
It ranked 15.32 mb/s on the site you mentioned.

I thought about the Video card because I already upgraded the RAM from 1Gb to 4Gb.
But it could be not video card related, but more of Hard Disk/RAM/CPU combinaton, which could be some performance tweaking possibility.

 

[giorgio]

What operating system are you running? If you have Vista or Windows 7 it has a built in speed test.

Do you have a Pentium 4 or a Core 2 Duo? If you have a Pentium 4 it's really kind of a slug these days. I have one that I replaced with a Quad Core system and the speed difference is night and day. The Pentium 4 is very slow by today's standards.

Fire up your Performance Monitor in Windows and open the application(s) you're noticing a slow down in while running them. See if the CPU is peaking out.

Also, keep in mind that if you have a browser open and one or more of the pages you're viewing has a good sized flash app running, this will hog system resources.

My PC has Pentium 4 D 2.80ghz
Windows XP

Specs here
Documentation

Not sure if I could upgrade the CPU but I'll check it out, I may return the video card and buy another CPU.

 

[usayit]

I have a very similar workstation at work. No problems except when the darn virus scanner kicks in... the scanner itself consumes most of my CPU. Also, I don't have a lot of flash websites up at the same time (I am suppose to be working..).

 

[Dao]

You may want to run the Task Manager, look under Process and make sure it is sorted by CPU with high CPU load process at the top.

Use the PC as usual and see which process use most of the CPU time when you the slow down occurs.

 

[giorgio]

I'll check it out

I do have Kaspersky which it may be scanning all the websites, I mean, specifically when the site is loading and the PC pauses.
I had Avira previously but removed it when I got infected from a website and Avira didn't detected it even after some days, just Kaspersky. But then again this one may take some Resources.

I may change the Video Card for a Softbox :thumbup: ha