Budget upgrade from 3DFX? Older system.

[snort1]

My friend needs to finally replace his old 3DFX 3000 AGP card. The system is a 700 PIII with 256MB ram. Might be upgrading slightly to a Celeron 1100 chip. Max for that board. Geforce 4200? Which one? How much?

 

[Rand]

I wouldnt bother with the GF4, it'll be overkill for the system and you'll clearly be processor limited. I wouldnt bother going beyond a GF3 Ti200 or a Radeon 8500LE.
Even those may be a bit much for the processor, but it is perhaps justifiable given they support DX8 features in hardware.

If you really want to go budget look into a Radeon 7500 or a GF4 MX440.... they'd be a better match for a PIII 700MHz performance-wise.

The situation is definitely better if you choose to upgrade to the Celeron 1.1GHz, but even then I don't think it'd be worth going beyond an R8500 for such a processor.

 

[vedin]

Nothing wrong with going with a ti4200. About 150 bucks give or take and solid performance. For about 100 bucks you can pick up a Radeon 8500LE. Little cheaper, little slower, you pay for what you get. Of course you will be a bit CPU bound with either, but once you turn on some anti-aliasing, or anistropic filtering, I doubt anything much above a 1.1ghz Celeron is going to be a lot faster with the same card. I wouldn't touch a Geforce 4MX no matter the price. (Can you say, "Suped up Geforce 2"?) Really, either one would make your friend happy, he'd be seeing frame rates and purdy graphics like he'd only imagined with either of them.

 

[snort1]

Probably $150 is allright, which is in the $150 range. I think the V3 was $200 and before that it was the Hercules Dyn 128 and Diamond Monster 3D $425 combination. (Old school) Not on this motherboard though. He does not upgrade the video card often.