10 year old needs help

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cusideabelincoln

Diamond Member
Aug 3, 2008
3,275
46
91
Originally posted by: Schmide
The 1650 pro is only $14 cheaper, the 3650 uses 10% less power, and is about 2.5x as powerful.

Certainly he will be capped by his processor but the better card could enable AA and play at higher resolutions. The 1650 pro is slow enough that it may even bottle neck his processor.

In my opinion the value is not antiquate for the level of performance.

edit : I pulled TF2 from another thread in my memory (oops), but the logic is the same.

I hope you will provide sources or some of these claims. The X1650 will NOT "bottleneck" his processor. It will be the other way around: His 1.5 GHz Athlon XP will bottleneck an X1650, to some degree.

And I do not believe the 3650 is 2.5x as powerful, either. The 3650 will be overall faster, and definitely be fastest in newer, shader-heavy games, but it's not over twice as powerful for casual or older games.

My recommendation is for him to spend the least amount of money possible. I would say he should go on ebay and look or these cards:

Geforce 6600GT, 6800 series, 7600 series
Radeon X1600 series, X1650 series, HD 2600 series, HD 3600 series

and see what's the cheapest he can get. His processor will be a limiting factor with just about any of these cards.
 

Schmide

Diamond Member
Mar 7, 2002
5,745
1,036
126
You're right, after rechecking. Looking it up it compares to a 2600xt which would be about 20% more than a 1650pro.

I think i thought it was comparable to a 2900xt instead of a 2600xt. It's actually a much crappier card than I thought it was. I retract my recommendation.
 

Denithor

Diamond Member
Apr 11, 2004
6,298
23
81
Originally posted by: cusideabelincoln
My recommendation is for him to spend the least amount of money possible. I would say he should go on ebay and look or these cards:

Geforce 6600GT, 6800 series, 7600 series
Radeon X1600 series, X1650 series, HD 2600 series, HD 3600 series

and see what's the cheapest he can get. His processor will be a limiting factor with just about any of these cards.

This. Try not to spend more than $40 including shipping, the old system just ain't worth it. If you go above that you'd have better results overall rebuilding completely around a 785G motherboard with a low power AM2 chip and use the integrated graphics (which should handle simple kids games with no problem).

Just for reference you could probably do cpu/motherboard/memory for about $150 and have a much much much faster computer overall than spending $50-100 on an AGP card for the old one.

EDIT: Ok, after looking around the 785G boards are too expensive. Try this setup.

AMD X2 5050e $70
Asus 780G $74 - $10MIR
Crucial 2GB kit $24 or Crucial 4GB kit $46

Contrary to what many will tell you XP runs just fine on 2GB of RAM so you can easily save $20 right there. With the rebate that would put you at a total of $158.
 

deimos3428

Senior member
Mar 6, 2009
697
0
0
Depending on what you have now, you might be better off buying a new motherboard with an IGP. The 790GX/785G/780G chipsets are quite good.

It'll cost a bit more than a low-end discrete card, but it'll also allow you to continue expanding the computer should you need more video performance later on, so it's not money "wasted".