upgrade advice

[Lucky 0]

Ok heres your chance to add your five cents worth everybody.

I want to know which will give me a bigger performance gain. I can only do one or the other. So some of the old parts will be kept the system is used mostly for games.

 

The choices are :

A leadtek geforce2 mx.

or

A duron 600mhz + Asus A7V

 

Current system is :

Gigabyte 5ax M/B

AMD K6-2 400mhz

128mb pc100 ram

Asus V3400tnt riva 16mb

WD 15.3GB 7200rpm HD

[nagual 0]

depends on what you do with it..games? what games? if youre a q3 freak go for the gayforce2, if you compile a lotta code go with the processor..tell us more what you do on the box

[Ronin 0]

nagual

 

gaygorce2????? What is that all about, you must be kidding....

 

 

Go with the video card if you want to play games, but beware you won't see much of a performance increase since you cpu with be the bottleneck of your entire system.

 

I would just save enough money and buy both items at the same time.

 

...

 

------------------

My Windows 2000 System:

 

Dual Intel 850's

Tyan Thunder 2400 MB

Onboard Intel 82559 NIC

512 Megs Ram

Adaptec 39160 Ultra 160

1 - 18 Gig Cheetah - U160

2 - 18 Gig Cheetah U2W

1 - Maxtor 60 Gig (IDE)

SB Live Platinum

Plextor 12/4/32 - Burner

Plextor 40x UW CD-Rom

10x Sony DVD Drive

Hercules Geforce 2 64meg

Dual V2 Cards, for D2

Viewsonic PF815 22" Monitor

...

My Win ME System:

 

PIII 733

Asus P3C4X MB

256 Megs PC133 Mem

Adaptec U2W Scsi Card

1 - 9 Gig Cheetah 10K

48x IDE CD-Rom

CL Geforce DDR

ESS 1371 Sound Card

[devils advocate 0]

i would def save up and get both...the way prices drop in 2 mos you could get and even faster processor, and maybe the thunderbird model if you stick w/ amd...and there will probably also be a nicer card out as well...and geforce 2 mx is a decent upgrade for the price, but it still uses sdr ram...you might even be able to snag a used geforce 2 gts for less then...i know i constantly sell of parts when I upgrade...hell, i'm still trying to unload a creative labs geforce ddr...anyways, your best bet is to wait...your image quality will increase w/ the nicer card, but the processor won't be able to pump out the frame rates to keep it smooth...or if you get the processor, your card won't have the memory or power to push out "pretty frames"

[Gerbache Kaznet 0]

Are you using the system to mostly play games? All games based on the Unreal engine are bottlenecked by the processor, so you're biggest performance gains come from there. Quake engines are typically bottlenecked by both, but the graphics card makes a bigger difference at high resolutions. For general computing, the processor is definitely the way to go, because everything will run faster. Hope that helps at least a little.

[Battleship 0]

Id say the mobo/cpu first. Then the GF or something else when you can afford it or whatever else is the big card of the moment.

 

Like Devs adv. said, there is always used vid cards out there if you have a little money left over after the mobo/cpu upgrade.

[mr_yellow 0]

go for the cpu and motherboard upgrade.

 

That will last you the longest and prove to be the most economical. Not only will it improve gaming performance but overall performance aswell. (we don't play games 99% of the time while using the computer do we?????)

 

You're TNT card is still decent and I'm sure things will become Much smoother after the CPU upgrade. You won't get a skyrocketing FPS but upgrading to geforceMX won't get you that either since your CPU will bottleneck it as well.

 

Trust me on this one. A geforce on a low MHz computer won't do jack for you. The difference from a tnt2Ultra on a 550celeron and a geforce2gts on a 550 celeron lets me play ~one resolution higher(without changing any details), to be specific, that just means I get to play decent at 800x600 to playing smooth at 1024x768. THis is with the Halflife Engine(CS of course).

 

I'd expect the same increase if i kept the tnt2ultra and upgraded to a duron or thunderbird(except then EVERYTHING is faster!)

 

Hope this helps.

 

P.S. get the a7v with multiplier adjust and OC that duron to 900!

 

mr_yellow