How To Speed Up Your PC For Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 is one of the hottest games of the year, but to play it on PC you need a powerful computer. Today you are going to learn how to speed up your computer for Battlefield 3, so that you squeeze out every last frame per second possible.

STEPS:

(1)   Defragment your hard drive. Although the benefit of this is not as great on newer Windows systems as it was in the days of Windows 98 or XP, you can still speed up the operation of your computer in most tasks by defragmenting the hard drive. Go to Start/Run and type 'defrag.exe' (minus the quotation marks) or if you can't get that to work do a search for 'Defrag' and click on the disk defragmenter tool. Follow the on screen instructions.

(2)   Update your video card drivers to the latest version possible. Both major reference card makers, ATi and nVidia have released new drivers for their cards that boast quite significant performance increases for Battlefield 3 and other new games. Visit either the ATi or nVidia website listed in the sources below to find the latest drivers for your card.

(3)   Turn off anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering. Unless you have a powerful system that can handle these two features (your video card is crucial here) they should be turned off. The decrease in image quality will be outweighed by the increase in frame rate on most systems.

(4)   Use a wired Internet connection. This will help you to drop lag, which can sometimes resemble slowing frame rates. If you cannot get access to wired Internet then update your wireless drivers.

(5)   Overclock your CPU and graphics card. This is for more advanced users, as you run the risk of permanently damaging your computer if this is done incorrectly. However, a good overclock can wring a lot of extra power out of your computer. See the sources for more on how to do this.

(6)   Shut down all programs that run in the background while playing Battlefield 3. You will be surprised at the number of unnecessary programs that run in the background on your computer. Switch them off and free up CPU power and system memory.