FFXIV Tech QuestionFollow

Been having some pretty bad lag in towns and around gate crystals, NPCs and players taking forever to load and just in general. Non crowded areas and the field are do-able on low settings.

OS: Vista
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4000+
GPU: Nvidia Gefore GTS 250
Memory: 2046 MB (2 below the minimum specs, not sure how its possible I run the game >.>)

My question is to see better results should I upgrade the memory or the processor? A local computer store quoted me 150 on getting 4 GB's of RAM and install. Thanks for any advice.

According to what I found and posted in the other thread earlier, your RAM is at the minimum required. Still, what Kao said would be your recommended upgrade path. I don't know what speed an X2 6400 CPU is, but an X2 2.0 is the minimum processor requirement.

Thanks for the advice guys, im gonna try upgrading the memory first and see how that does. In a way though it might be better to upgrade the processor and the RAM together if getting a new processor would cause the RAM type to be different.

Same issue as the OP, spec's are as follows;

CPU -AMD Athlon x2 7850 Black Edition (2.8ghz, 201mhz bus speed, x14 multiplier, 1.280 - 1.380 voltage) Which, runs at a cool 30-36 degrees according to Speedfan at 50-70% usage (backing up data).
Mo/bo - Gigabyte M57SLI-S4
RAM - Corsair DDR2 2gbx2 PC2-6400 (400mhz)(only 3.25 registered; damn 32-bit windows). (NB freq; 1800mhz, dram freq 402mhz, FSB:DRAM in a 1:2 ratio, dual channel.)
Gfx - Radeon HD 5770 1gb ddr3 ram, 157mhz core speed, 300mhz memory speed. (Driver v10.7 - could update to 10.9)
Internet connection is 15mb/s (8mb/s average) wireless (not the cheap kind; dual band)
32-bit XP. (wish i had 64-bit now)

Now, i dont have the money to upgrade the CPU (i've been told thats the chokepoint), so overclocking is the way to move forward; never done it before so any help towards that would be appreciated.

I already run at a fairly small 1280x768 or 1280x800 resolution with no AA, buffer at resolution, shadows at low, windowed (i hate not being able to do other things), and AO and DoF off. Standard textures and low filtering. And the game is often choppy (game skips every few seconds briefly), lag-like effects (likely actual lag from server location? I play on Besaid and i'm UK)and npcs/players take a long time to load (easily 5-10mins for a busy area.)

I've heard the cpu i have is horrible for overclocking but i might be able to squeeze it up to 207mhz x 15.5 at 1.45v, but as mentioned I dont want to sacrifice the life of the computer, considering the pricing of some components. Additionally from a bit of research it looks like the radeon gfx could be overclocked alot; a bit over an additional 100mhz gpu frequency and another 200mhz memory frequency (source; Clicky )

TLDR; does anyone know a reliable overclocking configuration for my specs?

Edit: Found something interesting actually designed for the AMD Black Edition; AMD Overdrive. Here. Does anyone have any experience using this? Edit2: nevermind, appears to be for Phenom and a mo/bo chipset I dont have.

Edited, Oct 11th 2010 9:08am by PipSqueak87

I heard easytunes was a bad idea until you know more about the bios and how to overclock, but the way you've explained it makes a bit of sense at least.

Thanks.

Edit; Just updated to CCC 10.9 and some windows cpu update or somesuch; so we'll see if there's any improvement before I go tinkering with OC'ing.

Edited, Oct 11th 2010 2:37pm by PipSqueak87

I had big problems too. Still do actually, Every so often the game crashes. I really am worried that its messing up my system when I have to do those cold restarts because nothing is functioning. However everything works fine after 10 crashes. Although sometimes I play for 5 hours with out a single problem.
What I did to fix the problem was download the 10.8 driver. I didn't uninstall the previous drivers either. But there were two files I had to have downloaded from the ATI website. That seemed to fix my problem. I have an ATI Mobility Radeon 5870 which is one of the best for laptops. Worked with no problems in Star Craft 2 or Sniper. But this game seems to demand a lot. I started having more trouble with the game after their new patch. I think it might have to do with the game.... =/ This is a funny solution but even the square enix tech page says that you should try resetting your modem because there might be bad data.
Goodluck!
Its a great game and I hope youll be online soon =)

Best,
AA