J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

My pc is 2 years old now, its an Athlon XP 1700+,Epox 8KHA+ mobo, 512 DDR with a Gforce 3 Ti 200, is it worth me buying another graphics card for it or should I wait and replace the lot.

It runs all the current games well enough but wouldnt mind a bit better frame rate.

stevebt

iTrader: (8)

replace the lot

Duck_Pond

Get a Radeon 9800 Pro (Powercolor) - I've just upgraded from an ATi 7500 in a similar system to yours. I wasn't sure whether to go for a system upgrade too... but the price of the card is well worth it, and now I can run all the latest games without a problem!

sti555

Decent graphics card, system spring clean & another dollop of ram should see a noticable improvement for little outlay

ChrisB

Upping from 512MB of RAM is going to see minimal performance benefits IMO.

Certainly the Radeon 9800 Pro is a fine card for the money (approx £130+VAT) - that was around £100 more five or six months ago. The next generation of ATi (& NVidia) cards will appear over the next few months but the 9800 Pro should provide enough grunt for a while yet...

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

DO I need another motherboard to run agp 8x or will the 4x do on my existing one ?

stevebt

iTrader: (8)

replace the lot what you have isnt worth keeping as it can be bought for under £100 no disrespect meant

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Fair point Steve, just didnt fancy pulling the whole lot apart with the attendant re build of windows etc.

Strange thing is, it plays 99% of stuff fine, might as well wait a year and buy a complete new setup.

Duck_Pond

It might only be worth about £100 but getting a new system is going to cost 5 times that, and in 3 months time it'll be worth **** all again. May as well keep flogging the old system to get your money's worth. Anyone who buys a new system every year to keep up with the latest specs is a fool, quite frankly. No disrespect meant

kamikaze

you might be able to get away with just a new graphics card which currently looks the weakest part of the setup. this should make a big difference

your system isnt that bad
like people have said the 9800 pro at 145 looks good

however the rumour is that the new nvida cards due out in the next 2 weeks will be 50-100 % faster than the 9800 pro

the difference between agp8 and 4 is negligable so dont worry about it

keep your motherboard and cpu and junk it if youree still not happy after a new card

stevebt

iTrader: (8)

here is some reasonably priced upgrades

http://www.komplett.co.uk/k/kc.asp?bn=10293

the graphics card is up to you

but that wont break the bank, but if your not in any hurry the longer you wait the cheaper everything gets even the graphics cards you might be thinking about now

topdog

http://bbs.scoobynet.co.uk/showthread.php?t=314088

DominicA

bearing in mind some of those 1700 chips will run at 2.5g, maybe worth looking at a new mobo, higher fsb ram and a 9800pro....£250 all in

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Bearing in mind that he is more than likely running an old style Palomino core XP, not a throughbred core and some being VERY FEW hitting a solid 2500Mhz without lots and lots of cooling and even then it has to be a trully superman chip

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Cant be bothered with the whole overclocking thing, been there, I like nice stable computing that doesnt require a car radiator style fan or water cooling, I cant be bothered to re-learn all the guff about FSB clocks, RAS/CAS latency and all the other crap I dont really need to know about, I decided life was to short to waste an evening getting another three frames per sec from Quake 3, can see the attraction (something for nothing) but I just havent got the time.

So the consensus is, new mobo, chip ram and graphics card, oh well, best get saving.