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Friend needs a budget upgrade

C

Chinoman

Senior member
He wants to play some MMORPG's and wants to spend only up to $150.
Right now, he has
Intel Pentium 4 1.7 GHz
128 MB RAM ... XD
GeForce MX 2

He just wants upgrades on his RAM and graphics card. Any suggestions?
 
not much on a dell.....with only 150 bucks.....maybe a 5500 or so.....not sure of the going rate these days, and that is sdram which isnt as cheap as ddr now.....i would get at least 512mb of ram and sell the 128mb stick, then try to get a better vidoe card with whats left...newegg has a 512mb pc133 stick for 69.00 plus shipping....that would leave about 80 bucks or a little less for a new vid card, they have an abit retail gforce fx5500 for 62.00 plus shipping....probably the best you will do with nvidia, you could always try ati but in my experience dells with nvidia cards dont work too welll with ati transplants🙂 not all mind you but some....
 
What memory speeds does his MB support? P4 is very sensitive to bandwidth. Which games will he be playing?
 
Originally posted by: allanon1965
not much on a dell.....with only 150 bucks.....maybe a 5700 or so.....not sure of the going rate these days, and that is probably sdram? not ddr....right?
Click to expand...


The 4300 was the first one to use DDR. My 4200 before it was SDR. 🙁

4x DDR + AGP.... CPU is limiting too.... 400FSB.

RAM is so dirt-cheap right now he should get a pair of 512's ($30-40 ea) and upgrade that video card to something decent like a Radeon 9600 on the cheap, or a little more for a vanilla nVidia 6600 AGP for just over $125.
 
He could get a 9600 for less than $100 and have room for some inexpensive memory. I would be nice if he could add about $100 to his limit, though.
 
Originally posted by: allanon1965
according to dells site the 4300 with the 1.7 intel processor uses sdram, not ddr....
Click to expand...

Whoops... I may have been mixed up then.... did I buy a 4200 or 4300?
You're most likely correct, and it wasn't until the 4400 that DDR came out. I know I was right ticked off about that, one generation being so much better.

Unlike the 4600 to 4700 which was a half-step BACKWARDS. 🙁
 
Guild Wars is amazing 🙂.

Yes it will run it, but that game has such stunning maps and terrain, he may want to step it up a bit.

I have a p4 2.8 prescott
1024mb pc3200
radeon 9800pro

and with all details set to as high as it can possibly go, and 4x AA, i get like 35fps.

Id be guessing that you would see like 20FPS with everything set to low.

Get a Radeon 9550, its only around $10 more then the fx5200, and is 3x as fast easy.
 
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