Device Metering Question

This isn't specific to Alienware but since I own 3 alienware laptops and you people seem to know your stuff, I thought you may be able to steer me in the right direction. Before I start, it's possible that what I'm looking for is built right into Vista but I've just never used it. If so, just point me in the right direction.

I use my laptops for gaming. Different games require different things to make them perform better. Some need faster CPUs, others need faster graphics cards. What I'm wondering is, does a tool exist to monitor the system devices WHILE you're playing a game so you can see, for that SPECIFIC game, what's slowing you down? For instance, if my CPU is using almost 100% of its resources, and I still have 1 Gig of free physical RAM, and the graphics card is using about 50% of its resources, adding RAM to the machine most likely won't speed it up much for THAT game. On the other hand, if the CPU is sitting at 50%, I still have 1 Gig of free physical RAM, but the graphics card is pegged at 100%, getting a faster graphics card would probably speed up THAT game.

I've seen plenty of benchmark tools that will show me how good the different system devices score, but haven't seen anything that you run WHILE playing a particular game to see what the bottleneck is for THAT game.

Anybody know of such a tool? Is it the mythical unicorn of software that would be nice to see but doesn't exist? Am I nuts to even ask for such an animal? Years ago I used a tool callef Pefmon I believe that came with whatever version of Windows I was using at the time but haven't fiddled with it in years. Not sure if it still exists and if it does, if it would be able to do what I'm talking about anyway.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

 

Not sure there is anything out there that will do what you want.

However, gaming is waaaay more dependant on the GPU (since other components, if new-ish, are capable of good performance).

Anything over 4GB of RAM is useless re: games (maybe if your trying to play a game in a virtual environment )

Anyway, you'll see higher synthetic benchmark scores with a better cpu, but unless a game is coded to use multiple cores the real-world difference will be minimal.

 

My game of choice is Everquest II mainly. It's fairly CPU intensive but I'd like to see if anything else is bogging it down on some of my other machines. EQ2 doesn't make much use of the GPU since it's still using basically the same engine it had when it was launched many moons ago. It was coded with the thinking that the clock speed would continue to keep going up instead of the move to multiple CPUs/cores.

 

Ok, since you are into those kinds of games, then by all means faster proc = better gaming

Again, RAM size will not make much of a difference, but speed will.