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Cheap Upgrades For the Holidays :-)

arcenite

arcenite

Lifer
I am looking for one or two things that I can do to my system that will give me a noticable performance increase for the cheapest price. I mean, not a whole lot more than 100 dollars if possible. Cause I am pretty sure the only thing I can do is get a whole new mobo+cpu+ram+case combo, since in order for me to do a new mobo, i would need a new case because this is in a HP shell. If anyone has any ideas please let me know, click on my rig to see my specs, thanks 🙂
 
I was going to advise that you get a Radeon 8500 LE 128MB card, but you already have a pretty good video card, so as long as you're not unhappy with what you have now, I see no reason why you would need to upgrade. One thing I would suggest, as long as it is supported by your hardware and as long as you don't feel the need to play ancient DOS-based versions of games, that you upgrade to Windows XP. Your hardware is quite fast enough to run it well, and you will almost certainly see an increase in the "smoothness" - if not the speed as well - of your system.
 
I was thinking about XP, but I heard somewhere that XP is sub-par for gaming, and that's pretty much alot of what I do. I guess I could Dual-Boot XP and 98SE, cause that would give me a fair division of OS's for gaming and regular applications. If I were to upgrade to the 8500LE, would I notice a major increase in gaming performance, or would it just be a little bit? I am sure it would be a big difference on a faster machine, but since my processor isn't top of the line, would it make that much of a difference? Thanks.
 
Also I was looking at the Sapphire line of ATI Powered boards. Anyone know if the Sapphire 9000Pro 128mb is up to par w/ the board by ATI?
 
Originally posted by: aRCeNiTe
I was thinking about XP, but I heard somewhere that XP is sub-par for gaming, and that's pretty much alot of what I do.
Click to expand...

XP works just as well for gaming as win98 does. the only problems you might have are if you were trying to run an older game coming from the DOS/win95 era 🙂

 
Originally posted by: Derango
Originally posted by: aRCeNiTe
I was thinking about XP, but I heard somewhere that XP is sub-par for gaming, and that's pretty much alot of what I do.
Click to expand...
XP works just as well for gaming as win98 does. the only problems you might have are if you were trying to run an older game coming from the DOS/win95 era 🙂
Click to expand...
Check out this for some real proof that XP is just as good (if not better) at gaming as Windows 98.
 
WinXP is great for gaming. I can run all my kids win 95/98 games on it. Occasionally, I will have to set compatibility mode in the shortcut properties for the game, but this is easy and has worked fine for all the games I have.

XP is also very stable. The only hangs I have had in 6 months of using it were when I pushed my OC too high. The rare occasion that a program crashes, I have almost always been able to just ctrl-alt-delete and end it without any reboots or anything.
XP is a memory hog, but with 768, you don't have to worry about that.

So if you are irritated by crashes and reboots with 98, go ahead and upgrade.
If not, I'm not sure there is much advantage to forking out the cash.

If you are a gamer, I think a video card would be a good upgrade for you. Of course if you get a Radeon 9700 or something, your cpu won't be able to feed it fast enough, especially with PC133 RAM. But my guess is something like a GF3 or a Radeon 8500 would give you a good performance boost for not too much money. By the way, I've got my Gainward Ti 200 Golden Sample running completely stable at just over Ti 500 speeds(240/510). Check out Tom's VGA Charts for a performance comparison on a number of cards from the TNT2 all the way up to the GF 4 and Radeon 8500 cards. It's the most comprehensive comparison I've seen and really helps in figuring out where all the different models of cards line up as far as performance. I think they have the Radeon 64 Vivo in there so you can compare.

 
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