vid upgrade worth it for an xp3200+ agp system?

[helkoid]

Hi all,

I'm hoping to get some advice on my current situation. I'm running:

AthonXP 3200+ (overclocked to 2.2ghz to achieve that rating, but still has a little room to move up as well)
1gig of ddr
Radeon 9800Pro 128mb (softmodded from 9800se)

Would it be in my best interest to get a new agp card or to put that money into a new system? I don't really need a super high end computer. I just want to run a few of the newer games at an ok resolution with the goodies turned on.

Also, are there many stores that carry the new agp Radeon x1950Pro? I'm having a hard time finding places that carry it. If I can get my hands on that card, what kind of performance could I expect?

Thanks in advance!
Travis

[RamonGTP]

A 1950pro would be a complete waste on any XP processor. Anything above something like a 6800GT or X800 series card would be a waste, and even those likely won't get the fill rate they need to truely show their potential. In a word, no, I don't think it would be worth it. Would you see a gain? Possibly, but it won't be much, not enough to justify the cost IMO, and then when you do upgrade the rest of your PC, you'll be SOL on the video card becuase you'd need to invest more money for a PCIe card.

[mjolnir1134]

Quote:

Originally Posted by RamonGTP

A 1950pro would be a complete waste on any XP processor. Anything above something like a 6800GT or X800 series card would be a waste, and even those likely won't get the fill rate they need to truely show their potential. In a word, no, I don't think it would be worth it. Would you see a gain? Possibly, but it won't be much, not enough to justify the cost IMO, and then when you do upgrade the rest of your PC, you'll be SOL on the video card becuase you'd need to invest more money for a PCIe card.

I agree, its usually better to save up for a PCI-e setup. What RamonGTP was saying is that your AthlonXP will probably bottleneck the actual performance of a x1950 card, meaning that your AthlonXP may not be able to handle the FULL power the x1950 is able to perform. Though even if you did slap the x1950 in there with your current setup, chances are quite good you see somewhat of a performance gain, but a stronger processor with PCIe will be the better road to take to play any of these newer games they advertise today (lol, more FPS's), it'll just take more patience and a little more money to save is all. Its actually what I'm doing right now.

My system setup is a pentium 4 3.0Ghz with a 6600GT 128mb AGP card, though I can get good frame rates here and there, I still have to tone down settings (such as certain lighting effects, anti-aliasing, antistropic filtering, etc) in order to have a playable game. I stuck a 6600GT in my rig to replace my 9600pro not too long ago, I just bought the pentium 4 and the 6600GT around this summer, and I'm a little disappointed how I didn't get TOO much of a performance gain. This further disappoints me when I download the game demos off of Fileplanet; recently tried out BF2142 and I got shoddy and choppy gameplay.

The thing I'm strongly suggesting you to do is not have to be bottlenecked by weaker CPU's and interfaces, just save up for a PCIe system: it'll be worth it.