Upgrade question.

[Randy Simons]

I think he might be right after all. A fast vidcard in a slow PC might not do the trick. Besides, a modern vidcard (let's say a Radeon 8500 with 512Mb memory) wil cost you perhaps even more €€€ than a modest mainbord/CPU upgrade.

OTOH, your the 16MB on your G400 is perhaps simply not enough to keep the textures -> will use AGP -> slow. (although THAT might vastly improve with a 133MHz DDR memorybus..)

But, as you can see now with the 16MB, don't go for "less but cheap"..

[Alec]

Besides, a modern vidcard (let's say a Radeon 8500 with 512Mb memory) wil cost you perhaps even more €€€ than a modest mainbord/CPU upgrade.

But, as you can see now with the 16MB, don't go for "less but cheap"..

I see a contradiction there...




A fast videocard does the trick. I saw it with my own eyes, a 350Mhz Pentium II being brought to life with a Geforce 2 MX400. Mine is a 468Mhz system. Besides, It´s just temporary until I buy a new system.

[Nuno]

Alec, if you buy a new video card your CPU will be the bottleneck. You won´t really see the performance increase you´re hoping. I don´t know about MythIII, but RTCW is severely cpu limited. A SSE-less celeron @ 72 Mhz fsb just don´t cut it anymore. A G400 is still adequate to play the latest releases at least at 800x600x16. You´ll need a good cpu to back it up. Look at games minimum specs lately: I´ve got Alice box in front of me and it says 64Mb Ram and a 16 Mb video card, but with a 400 Mhz PentiumII as minimum.

My advice? Get a ECS K75A + a Duron 850 for ~30000$00 (~150€ daqui a uns dias ). You´ll be able to even use all your old components and upgrade it in the future with a AthlonXP+DDR.

Hint: http://www.chiptec.net/index.php

[Alec]

Obrigado pela dica, Nuno.

That´s what I will do... after buying a new graphics card.

[Alec]

OK, just installed my new Geforce 2 MX400 64Mb 128-bit SDRAM AGP TV-Out... and it did the trick. I can play RTCW at 1024x768 32-bit, high detail and all. UT looks very good and it plays fast at constant frame rates, averaging 50-55 fps at 1024x768 32-bit, high detail textures. This card is good at 3D.

BUT... 2D image, although with vivid colours, is a tad blurrier, or better said, not as crisp as the G400. But the difference is not very noticeable.

Not bad for 77 dollars.

I don´t regret a bit having bought this card, as I intend to couple it with a much faster processor and motherboard than what I have now (Celly@476Mhz), but I hope Matrox launches a new card with 3D gaming power in a somewhat near future, because I´m addicted to its superb 2D quality.