A recent guide showed you how to build your gaming PC from scratch: a killer DirectX10 machine for just £576. You've already committed yourself to getting your hands dirty to save a few bob. Why, then, should you stop at the final hurdle of pushing those components beyond their factory defaults? Without spending a penny over last month's budget, we're going to take those components and tweak the hell out of them.
We'll start simple, by stripping Vista down to free up system resources, and then we'll start to play around with overclocking tools. We'll be trimming off as much flab from Vista as is humanly possible - so it's worth bearing in mind that while our PC is geared up for games, you may want to leave some of this stuff switched on for desktop doings.
Crucially, we're not going to add any cooling over and above what's already included in our PC spec - so however fast we can make it run now, for a few extra pounds you can probably eke out even more performance than we have. It's also worth remembering that every system is different: no two CPUs or northbridge chips are quite the same, so you may find your results are higher or lower than ours.
Overclocking does require some confidence. Yes, it's possible to damage system components - motherboards are particularly prone to giving up - but as long as you're reasonably careful and sensible you'll find PC electronics are more robust than you'd think.
Just be careful and you'll be fine (although be warned that you follow any of the instructions in this feature entirely at your own risk - things can go wrong and you need to be prepared for that). Raise settings a few megahertz a time, one fraction of a volt after another, and make sure you know how to reset everything with the CMOS clear jumper on your mother-board if your machine stops booting.
That's it for warnings, caveats and disclaimers. Are you ready to get something for nothing? Let's get on with installing Vista and seeing how far we can push it.
SLIM IT DOWN Trim the non-gaming flab from Vista
As you're no doubt aware by now, Windows Vista doesn't have the best reputation as a gaming platform yet. At the time of launch, it wasn't just slower than Windows XP, thanks to bad graphics drivers (among other things) it was much slower than Windows XP.
Nowadays, the two operating systems are on a par for DirectX 9 games - and of course, Vista is essential for running DirectX 10 versions of games. The good news is, you can speed up out-of- the-box Vista. Not enormously, it's true, but the benefits of paring down the operating system to its essentials are more obvious than in XP these days, where modern processors barely flinch at handling its background processes.
So here's our quick and easy guide to a minimal Vista setup, designed to keep your games running at their fastest.
1: We'll assume you've assembled your £576 PC properly and that it boots up without any worrying beeps or 'Keyboard missing, press any key to continue' messages. First thing to do, then, is hit Del to enter the BIOS setup screen. After a couple of seconds your monitor will switch to the blue settings menu. Press the right cursor to go to the 'Boot' tab, and then press 'Down' to select 'Boot Device Priority'.
2: Hit Enter and then use Page Up and Page Down to rearrange the devices so that your DVD drive is option 1, and your hard drive (which will appear as a serial number) is option 2. Press F10 and choose to 'Save and exit'. Your PC will reboot itself, and you'll get a prompt to 'Press any key to boot from CD...' Do as the man says and tap that keyboard, then select 'Windows Vista' from the menu that appears.
3: There'll be a brief pause while your system loads some basic drivers and settings, and then you'll be taken through the Vista setup. It's all very straightforward and, compared to Windows XP installation, mercifully quick. Just give your PC a name and set the region, and let Vista do the rest. It'll reboot a couple of times, so it's best if you go and have a cup of tea. In fact, dig out the biscuits too. Mmm, biscuits.
4: At some point, you'll need to go back to step 1 and set your hard drive as the primary boot device. But not right now. Instead, on the final reboot, you'll be taken to the Vista home screen. Click past all the opening guff that appears - it might take some time as Windows examines your hardware - and in the Welcome menu uncheck the box that says 'Show this page when Windows starts'. You really don't want to see it again.
5: Now it's driver time. Inserting the Asus driver disc that came with your motherboard will bring up options to install all the drivers for your chipset, RAID controller, network card and audio, in one mouse click. The PC may restart a couple of times; that's fine. From this disc, you may also want Asus Update and Asus PC Probe II from the Utilities menu, to help you flash the BIOS (should you need to) and monitor temperatures.
6: Connect your PC to the internet and allow it to download all the Vista updates it needs. There are four hotfixes for graphics performance which may not install automatically. Grab them from: tinyurl.com/37wwco, tinyurl.com/2zvljr, tinyurl.com/2b48un and tinyurl.com/ys2baa. Now you'll need graphics drivers from nVidia's site (www.nvidia.com). Click 'Download drivers', then 'Beta drivers'. Install the latest ones.
7: Now let's start working on Vista. First, the easy bit: we'll get rid of the sidebar. Simply right click on the sidebar icon in the Task Bar, click 'Properties' and deselect 'Start Sidebar when Windows starts'. Then close it down by right clicking and selecting 'Exit'. Now for the slightly-less-easy bit: open up the Start menu and type 'services.msc' in the search bar, and open the program that appears.
8: Behold: every service currently running on your PC. You don't need most of them. Type 'msconfig' in the search bar and open that - just as in XP, you can now disable unnecessary services from running at start-up, freeing up system resources. You may want to turn User Account Control off too to prevent those nag screens (Control Panel>User Accounts and Family Safety>User Accounts) - although this does expose a security risk.
9: You'll probably want to turn off the Aero interface (Control Panel>Appearance and Personalisation>Personalisation>Window Colour & Appearance>Open classic appearance properties), which can hog background resources when you're gaming. If you're feeling brave, you may also want to head over to Control Panel>Uninstall A Program and click 'Turn Windows Features On and Off' in the left hand pane.
10: Hear that grinding noise? That's Windows Vista trying to index every file on your hard drive, from the donkey movies you keep hidden, to each individual texture of Half-Life 2. It is a pointless, fruitless task only Microsoft could imagine you would want your PC to do by default. Investigate Control Panel>System & Maintenance>Indexing Options to put a halt to Vista's constant and obsessive disk thrashing.
OVERCLOCK THE HELL OUT OF IT
We'll start by tweaking the motherboard settings - the CPU, the FSB and the RAM timings - before overclocking the graphics card. That's because these all need to be done in the BIOS and we want our PC running nice and smoothly before we begin to push its 3D limits.
The key to successful overclocking is to change things in small increments, and then boot into Windows to test stability before going further. A good way to see if your PC can cope with the new settings is to run a few tests from something like 3DMark for a few minutes. If it locks up or crashes, you need to drop the last change to your settings.
CPU Settings
1: In the BIOS 'Advanced' screen move down to 'CPU configuration'. The CPU speed is obtained by multiplying the FSB speed by either 6 or 7. We'll leave ours at 7.
2: Back in Advanced, choose 'JumperFree Configuration'. We'll need more juice, so scroll down to 'CPU VCore Voltage', and move it from Auto to around 1.425V.
3: You'll notice that higher voltages change the colour of the setting, warning you of how safe Asus thinks your new level is. Red should probably be avoided.
Fiddling With The Front Side Bus
1: Our actual CPU clockspeed is going to be a multiplier of the FSB - which is confusingly called 'CPU Frequency' in this BIOS. Use the '+' key to change this to 333MHz.
2: Once again, you're going to need to increase the juice. Scroll down to 'FSB Terminal Voltage' and change this from Auto to 1.3v or 1.4v - your call.
3: We don't want to overclock the PCI-E and PCI buses just yet, so manually fix 'PCI Express Frequency' at 100MHz, and the 'PCI Clock Synchronisation Mode' to 33.33MHz.
Thanks For The Memory
1: Our memory speed is also determined as a multiple of the FSB - but there are only a few ratios available to us. Choose the option closest to the default speed, 800MHz.
2: To help with stability, we'll also increase the voltage a bit. DDR2 RAM requires 1.8V by default, but should safely handle 2.0v. You can always fine tune it later.
3: Latency settings are under 'Advanced>North Bridge Chipset Configuration'. Leave the 'Configure DRAM Timing by SPD' setting at 'Enabled' for the time being.
Go Faster Graphics
1: To tune the graphics card, install the nVidia nTune tool (tinyurl.com/32uoxv). Then right click on the desktop, and select 'nVidia Control Panel>Performance'.
2: This powerful app can change the core and memory clockspeeds of your graphics card for better performance. Just move the sliders and hit 'Apply'.
3: Our 8800GTS 320 comes clocked at 575MHz for the processor, and 900MHz for the memory - we got it running at 620MHz/1000MHz with ease.
Our Final Timings
What were our final settings? We beefed the FSB right up to 420MHz, giving us a CPU running at just under 3GHz - as fast as Intel's fastest, in other words. The memory was set to 840MHz on default timings, and the graphics card at 620MHz/1000MHz. You might not get the same: overclock a bit at a time.
HOW DOES IT COMPARE? Any tech website can run a few benchmarks with lots of fancy image quality stuff on, but we're only going to show you what counts. We took our handmade PC, plugged it into a standard 22-inch widescreen monitor and tested it, before and after overclocking.
We then compared the scores to an off-the-shelf £1,000 PC that we've... appropriated. Yes, that's the right word. All these benchmarks were taken at 1680x1050 resolution, with medium settings and DirectX 10 enabled where possible. The results speak for themselves - in a firm manly voice that you can hear in the next room.
Supreme Commander
£576 PC = 16,336 £1,000 PC = 16,963 PC Gamer super rig = 17,167 (WINNER)
Chris Taylor's RTS is a notorious system hog, and it also comes with a very detailed benchmark app, which we've used to get a like-for-like comparison. It takes a while to run, but reveals lots about your PC.
World in Conflict
£576 PC = 30fps £1,000 PC = 45fps PC Gamer super rig = 47fps (WINNER) You'll mostly be playing this online, and framerate issues are as likely to come from lag as from your PC. A good job, then, that our overclocked rig outperforms everything else in the built-in performance test.
Bioshock
£576 PC = 45.41fps £1,000 PC = 53.96fps PC Gamer super rig = 56.48fps (WINNER) A stuttering framerate will result in death by Splicer, but there's no built-in benchmarking tool. We ran through a section of Neptune's Bounty firing flaming bolts while measuring the rendering rates with FRAPS.
Crysis
£576 PC = ??fps £1,000 PC = ??fps PC Gamer super rig = ??fps (WINNER, OBV) Fooled you. The tiresome truth is, at the time of writing, no benchmarkable Crysis code exists - the game ain't finished. When it does, we shall test our PCs, and blog about how well it does at www.pcgamer.co.uk.
HOW DID WE DO? Seems like a good deal to us
The £1,000 rig we used for comparison boasted 4Gb of Crucial Ballistix DDR2 RAM, an Intel 975BX motherboard, a Core 2 Duo E6700 and an XFX GeForce 8800 Ultra Extreme 3D card. It's not the fastest PC out there, but it's not far off.
A quick glance at the benchmarks suggests that the extra £424 would be just dead money - but then our tests weren't overly taxing. As resolutions and image quality rises, the memory bottleneck in the 320Mb 8800GTS does become more apparent - though it's easily upgraded.
We should also point out that we by no means reached the limit of our £576 PC's capability here - but the outstanding results we achieved didn't cost us a single lock-up or blue screen of death.
The moral: if you game on anything up to a 1680x1050 monitor, a brand new PC which can give you playable framerates at respectable quality settings needn't cost you the Earth.
As long as you're prepared to run your warranty through a shredder and risk shortening the life of a few components, that is.
This feature is good for people on a budget, but kind of forgets towards the end that a £1000+ rig can be overclocked just as well as a £575 odd rig.
Also, for your grand, you can get much better stuff than the stuff listed. Firstly, the P35 chipset is far better than the 975 for overclocking purposes. The E6700 is a pretty silly choice for a processor now, with intel's newer, faster, more overclockable and cheaper E6850 around. Also, buying an 8800 Ultra is crazy talk, as this card is essentially an overclocked 8800GTX, with not a great deal of performance increase. Nvidia's new 512MB 8800GTS can match the 8800GTX frame for frame, and would have been a better choice, at half the price of the Ultra.
Taking all this into account, the final conclusion drawn that a sub £600 PC is the only thing worth buying is wrong, as you've compared it to a defunct higher-end machine. The extra £424, if spent wisely, would provide a much bigger performance increase than shown, and would also allow you to invest in some more future-proof hardware.
One more thing: why suggest increasing the voltage before tweaking the FSB? It should only be raised to increase system stability as it is required. And a voltage increase that far above the factory recommendation is quite daft anyway, as you'll seriously risk processor lifespan depending on the individual processor.
Nice stuff about making Vista move its fat bottom though.
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