[SOLVED] More welly required for Half Life 2

I am using a two-year-old Asus A7V8X motherboard with a two-year old
processor, an Athlon 1.9 at 1600mhz and 512mb RAM, with an 128mb
Radeon Pro graphics card.

Half Life 2 does run, but it takes a long time to load, and I was
wondering which bit of kit to beef up to make the system run at its
best.

My first thought is to get an AMD Barton 3000, and upgrade the BIOS on
the motherboard to cope with it (hopefully without killing the
machine).

Does anyone have any better advice?

nl

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:15:17 GMT, nl<> wrote:

>I am using a two-year-old Asus A7V8X motherboard with a two-year old
>processor, an Athlon 1.9 at 1600mhz and 512mb RAM, with an 128mb
>Radeon Pro graphics card.
>
I should have said, 128mb Radeon 9800 Pro.

nl

"nl" <> wrote in message
news:...
> On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:15:17 GMT, nl<> wrote:
>
>>I am using a two-year-old Asus A7V8X motherboard with a two-year old
>>processor, an Athlon 1.9 at 1600mhz and 512mb RAM, with an 128mb
>>Radeon Pro graphics card.
>>
> I should have said, 128mb Radeon 9800 Pro.

Your cpu is definately the bottleneck here, the a7v8x is a good board, i had
one myself till it died and shouldnt be a problem. what sort of hard drive
have you got, if loading times are an issue?
maybe another 512mb ram to bring it up to 1gb would make a diff too

>
> nl

i'm running HL2 on a poorer machine and my son is too on a better machine
than yours. both take a while to load the game - it seems a bit of a slow
loader generally. but it plays fine on both. I'm not sure upgrading anything
would make too much diference except maybe a super fast hard drive?


"nl" <> wrote in message
news:...
> On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:15:17 GMT, nl<> wrote:
>
>>I am using a two-year-old Asus A7V8X motherboard with a two-year old
>>processor, an Athlon 1.9 at 1600mhz and 512mb RAM, with an 128mb
>>Radeon Pro graphics card.
>>
> I should have said, 128mb Radeon 9800 Pro.
>
> nl

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 14:05:18 GMT, "Iain Dingsdale"
<> wrote:

>
>"nl" <> wrote in message
>news:.. .
>> On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:15:17 GMT, nl<> wrote:
>>
>>>I am using a two-year-old Asus A7V8X motherboard with a two-year old
>>>processor, an Athlon 1.9 at 1600mhz and 512mb RAM, with an 128mb
>>>Radeon Pro graphics card.
>>>
>> I should have said, 128mb Radeon 9800 Pro.
>
>Your cpu is definately the bottleneck here, the a7v8x is a good board, i had
>one myself till it died and shouldnt be a problem. what sort of hard drive
>have you got, if loading times are an issue?
>maybe another 512mb ram to bring it up to 1gb would make a diff too
>
It's a 120gb SATA drie but the make escapes me.

I do realise that HL2 is a pretty demanding program, so I'm not
expecting reload times like HL1 (which I always thought were
wonderfully fast, especially compared to other games of that era like
Thief II.)

nl

"nl" <> wrote in message
news:...
> On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 14:05:18 GMT, "Iain Dingsdale"
> <> wrote:
>
>>
>>"nl" <> wrote in message
>>news:. ..
>>> On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 10:15:17 GMT, nl<> wrote:
>>>
>>>>I am using a two-year-old Asus A7V8X motherboard with a two-year old
>>>>processor, an Athlon 1.9 at 1600mhz and 512mb RAM, with an 128mb
>>>>Radeon Pro graphics card.
>>>>
>>> I should have said, 128mb Radeon 9800 Pro.
>>
>>Your cpu is definately the bottleneck here, the a7v8x is a good board, i
>>had
>>one myself till it died and shouldnt be a problem. what sort of hard drive
>>have you got, if loading times are an issue?
>>maybe another 512mb ram to bring it up to 1gb would make a diff too
>>
> It's a 120gb SATA drie but the make escapes me.

that should be absolutely fine then, if it was an ancient 20 gig hd or
something i'd expect terrible loading times.

>
> I do realise that HL2 is a pretty demanding program, so I'm not
> expecting reload times like HL1 (which I always thought were
> wonderfully fast, especially compared to other games of that era like
> Thief II.)
>

its going to take an age to load on anything to be honest, but your cpu is
probably the bottleneck here more than anything

> nl

In article <>, nl says...
> I am using a two-year-old Asus A7V8X motherboard with a two-year old
> processor, an Athlon 1.9 at 1600mhz and 512mb RAM, with an 128mb
> Radeon Pro graphics card.
>
> Half Life 2 does run, but it takes a long time to load, and I was
> wondering which bit of kit to beef up to make the system run at its
> best.
>
> My first thought is to get an AMD Barton 3000, and upgrade the BIOS on
> the motherboard to cope with it (hopefully without killing the
> machine).
>
> Does anyone have any better advice?
>
Diid you do a defrag after it had unencrypted the cache files? THey're
fragmented to holy hell after HL2 was activated.



--
Conor

Normality will be restored once we work out what normality actually is.

"nl" <> wrote in message
news:...

" I am using a two-year-old Asus A7V8X motherboard with a two-year old
processor, an Athlon 1.9 at 1600mhz and 512mb RAM... "

What speed and manufacturer is your RAM? The Athlon XP 1900+ is a 266FSB
CPU, and you'll need at least PC2700 RAM to get the potential from a 333FSB
Athlon XP.


" My first thought is to get an AMD Barton 3000, and upgrade the BIOS on
the motherboard to cope with it "

Just make sure it's the 333FSB version, and not the more-common 400FSB one.
The bog-standard A7V8X could only handle 333FSB, so double-check your
motherboard ID before buying.

http://www.asus.com.tw/support/cpusu...pusupport.aspx

http://www.asus.com.tw/support/downl...8X&Type=Latest

nl<> wrote:

>>I am using a two-year-old Asus A7V8X motherboard with a two-year old
>>processor, an Athlon 1.9 at 1600mhz and 512mb RAM, with an 128mb
>>Radeon Pro graphics card.

>I should have said, 128mb Radeon 9800 Pro.

None of the above would have much influence on loading speeds. I've
noticed it's slow to load on a couple of machines, both much higher
spec than yours, but plays fine. I'd also expect it should play
perfectly well on yours and you'd probably have to spend serious money
to see much improvement. I just think the game *is* slow to load -
there is almost 4GB of it!! ;-)

You might speed it up a tad by going totally OTT and installing a SATA
RAID array or something similar but even then I doubt it's ever going
to be lightning fast to load.

As Conor suggested, the bloody awful install/activation/decryption
crap they use has probably splattered files all over the drive so a
defrag may well help.

--
>iv< Paul >iv<

On Thu, 18 Nov 2004 19:17:26 -0000, "Cuzman" <>
wrote:

>"nl" <> wrote in message
>news:.. .
>
>" I am using a two-year-old Asus A7V8X motherboard with a two-year old
>processor, an Athlon 1.9 at 1600mhz and 512mb RAM... "
>
>What speed and manufacturer is your RAM? The Athlon XP 1900+ is a 266FSB
>CPU, and you'll need at least PC2700 RAM to get the potential from a 333FSB
>Athlon XP.
>
>
>" My first thought is to get an AMD Barton 3000, and upgrade the BIOS on
>the motherboard to cope with it "
>
>Just make sure it's the 333FSB version, and not the more-common 400FSB one.
>The bog-standard A7V8X could only handle 333FSB, so double-check your
>motherboard ID before buying.

Thanks, I took the lid off , and found the FSB333 label on the south
bridge. Sadly it isn't so easy to tell what speed the memory is. I
was looking for old receipts at one point to find out what I ordered
when I built the thing... 2700 RAM rings a bell though...

nl