As the story goes I've ordered a new GPU, decided just now to open my case up and give the place a bit of a hoover...having not done this for several years you can imagine the amount of dust accumulation....but that was'nt the reason for an FPS boost. I noticed I had two PCI-E slots, obviously when I built the thing 4 years ago I never bothered to read about PCI-E x16/x8/x4 slots at all....turns out my trustee old 9600GT has been sat in the same slot for fours years.....so I fired up RF2 and a quick FPS test I was getting an average of 70fps (wont go into settings details no need) So in my brilliant wisdom I checked my Mobo manual and sure enough the empty slot...with 4 years worth of dust...was in fact the x16 slot...I had her in the x4 slot all this time....so the switch over was made and a quick jump into RF2 and sure enough a WHOPPING 30fps extra....no joke, no lie, hand on heart 30fps extra! So in conclusion, CHECK what PCI-E slots you have and maybe...just maybe you made a schoolboy error like me!
SOLVED lol, but seriously...glad you found it out. Soonest is better than later.....but better late than never.
Hahah...that reminds me of when I built my first PC. I had the FSB jumpers on the MOBO set to "Safe Mode" (133 Mhz FSB) for 1 or 2 years before I realized it...I was wondering why it failed every time I tried to OC the damn thing... Needless to say (but I'm going to anyway) it ran a WHOLE LOT faster setting it to normal mode. The great thing is, though...I'm sure neither of us will make these mistakes again!
yeah I'm kinda annoyed with myself though that I never realised this before, can now race at Monaco with low settings just fine whereas I could'nt before! Gonna be a world apart still from my new GPU though so at least I can look to even better settings with that!
Oh Marc lol, I've recently upgraded my cpu/mobo/ram and your post made me double check my vid card (it's in the x16 slot) lol. Just out of interest which card you gone for I'm too on the lookout for a new GPU preferably Nvidia but they don't seem to be launching anything new around the price point I'm looking at ~GBP200. If I played something other than rF1/2 I'd probably have had an AMD HD7850 by now, been some good deals around on these cards and they o/c really well too.
yeah I've gone for the 7850, this is a great deal and I got 10% off: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-052-HS Plenty of OC'ing advice in the Graphics Card section here, seems 7850s OC very well indeed: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/index.php if you 'Like' their Facebook page and then e-mail them to say you've done so you'll get the 10% off voucher like I did. My first time going to ATi, been nVidia since forever I think.
BF3 is now playable too, I had it on lowest settings before and it would'nt run smoothly enough, now on the same settings I get an average of mid 30s.....still not good enough for a first person shooter but I can at least play a bit of before friday!
But you know what? If you hadn't have done that all these many years ago, you wouldn't have gotten a "free" GPU upgrade today. I'll bet it's just like getting a new video card, isn't it? THAT is a masterful bit of self-trickery to save yourself $200. Well played, sir!
In the future, the slot that's highest on the motherboard will be the fastest, hate for anyone else to waste performance for x amount of years.
