Hey, Just looking for advice on the best programs out there I can use to monitor performance load etc so I can tweak or upgrade whatever is slowing me down. My rig is pretty decent but I would still like to push it further Specs: win7 pro Intel i7-3820 3.6ghz 8 GB ram Asus ATI HD7970 DirectCU II TOP, 3GB SSD HD Also have a secondary monitor which I never use I can set up to monitor loads. So what's the best programs or advise I can use in relation to my GPU, CPU etc?
I don't know how technical you are, so I am going to suggest a very simple option. I'm sure others can suggest more comprehensive solutions and I am myself interested to hear them. Resource Monitor is built in to Win7. You can get to it by hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del, then clicking the "Start Task Manager", then clicking the "Resource Monitor" button. This give you tabs where you can see core usage, RAM usage etc.
MSI Afterburner for GPU monitoring. I think it can also monitor CPU stats as well..... But I would strongly advise against adding a second monitor, as a lot GPUs take a significant performance hit from the 2nd work load. But monitoring your hardware in of itself won't tell you where the bottle neck is. If you haven't delved into useroptions.ini and understand what each setting is for, and how they correlate to load. For general tweaks, I would right off the bat recommend disabling Windows Aero Desktop, or switching to a non-aero theme. Even when games are in full screen, aero seems to load down the system doing who knows what. For PS2 specific tweaks, there are several threads explain what each setting does and the overall impact on performance..... however, the 2 most notable settings are Flora and Shadows. Turn both of those down or off and FPS stability increases substantially.
Yes I heard MSI afterburner was good, but my Vid card is a ASUS, ATI. Would you still recommend MSI afterburner for the monitoring and the Overclocking? The ATI catalyst App seems to do a good job with overclocking as it is, why take afterburner over that?
