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Athlon 500 + Geforce 3 or Athlon 900 + Geforce 2mx

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Phoenixhunter

Member
I have a MSI K7 Pro (MS-6195) motherboard with an Athlon 500 and 256mb of PC-100 SDRAM and an aging Voodoo 3 3000 and I am debating my next upgrade. The motherboard only supports a max of AGP 2x, not 4x.

Essentially I would like some feedback from people with lower end systems like mine on whether or not the Geforce 3 takes enough "burden" off the processor that I would get decent framerates without a bottleneck. If so, I would probably upgrade to either Slot A Athlon 800 or 900 depending on availability.

The third option would be to just wait and go with a next gen AMD motherboard chipset and the Athlon MP CPU but I'm kind of looking for a "now" solution for this summer's LAN parties.

Thanks in advance.
 
It really depends on what resolution you game at. I believe that at 1024 x 768, the Video card is the main issue, and the cpu becomes less of a bottleneck.

In my experience, I have a celeron 800 (100 Mhz bus) and "upgraded" my Voodoo3 3000 to a Radeon LE, running at 175 MHz. It did improve things at higher resolutions, but the difference isn't all that great. It may be because I run Win2K. My old glide games even seem worse off (at least visually). I borrowed a Geforce Ultra once, and it did seem to improve things quite a bit, taking a lot of "burden" off the processor.


You might want to try a middle ground. The GeForce2 GTS Pro is only $132, and performs close to the Ultra. This is over $200 cheaper than a GeForce3, giving you enough to upgrade your MB and cpu to 1 GHz.
 
no question about it, a 500 is not enough to do the geometry and physics of many games. if you were to try a CPU bound old game like Falcon 4 or a simulator your system would blow.
your choices don't make sense inasmuchas an Athlon900+GFMX will cost nothing like a GF3. for $350 USD you could pick
* a wide variety of boards and a Duron overclocked to 1000MHz, and easily afford a GF2 pro which is fast and the industry standard.
* a KT133A board, AXIA Y Athlon 1GHz, Radeon LE
I really wouldn't bother with a slot A. people are overclocking socketA 1GHz chips to 1.4GHz these days.
your GFMX would be quite fast in 800x600 but not above that or with FSAA. still, you could get the combo under $150
it's worth keeping in mind that the GF3 is "overpriced" in line with its new and exalted product status. on the other hand my choices won't fall much more in price. I realise your LAN parties probably will use low resolution high framerates for smoothness so an MX might work. but I wouldn't like to use one at home.
 
for the most part cpu power is the most important thing when it comes to gaming, a high end graphics card gives you eye candy and high res power, but a high end graphics card on a slow cpu will give you nothing in most but not all games.

match your system parts, compormise
 
I'm with Travis...don't get sucked into upgrading your older Slot board - get a Socket A and sell your old combo 😉

Makes a LOT more sense and gives you future upgrade paths too 😉

One thing I might recommend though is a KT133E board - same as the 133A essentially but was actually faster when overclocked.

Look for old reviews on here - Abit KT133E 🙂
 
Alright, maybe I'll save up another two paychecks worth and go with an Athlon 4, essentially the root of my question was whether or not a graphics card could "postpone" my upgrade and apparently (thanks to your advice) it won't really.

Anyone know how long I'm going to have to wait to see the Athlon 4?
 
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