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Getting Life out of Old AGP System

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wsuhhishbren

Junior Member
Whatsup anandtech
First post here. Anyways heres the deal.

I have an old system. It's a stock Compaq Presario - PC173A with:


Pentium 4 @ 2.8GHz HT
1.5gigs of ram, it's either ddr or ddr2, ddr I"m pretty sure.
Geforce FX5200 128mb
XP Home

http://www0.dealtime.com/xPF-Compaq-PC137AABA-Compaq <--- that should be it.

I"m looking to buy a new AGP card for cheap just so I can play some games decently until I drop my cash on a high end DIY desktop/possibly a notebook for college in a few months.



When I look at Newegg right now there isn't much, but I"ll be keeping my eyes peeled for either in-store/online ads from various vendors
I"m hoping to get something like this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814143019
or the XT version, for around 30$, which they were on sale for in the past...hopefully they still exist/will be restocked. Right now though, I only see 6200s for 50$, which seems like..a rip off to me. So yeah.



Basically, I"m wondering, if I do that, will my CPU be a huge bottleneck? Would an overclock help? I just want 40+ constant FPS on CoD:MW2 at a decent resolution, at least at 1024x768 (preferably one resolution notch higher though) with a mixture of low/med settings if not better, and am willing to go easy on the effects if it helps performance.




Currently I'm playing on a 12" laptop..yeah..with an AMD Neo Processor @ 1.6ghz + an ATI Mobility 3410 (HP dv2)


.........so...I"m thinking it would be a decent upgrade in a bunch of ways


-the Neo is a single core after all? And clocked at 1.6gHz..
-12" screen..wtf
-ATI Mobility Radeon 3410 Graphics...<<<<<<<< a Geforce 6800?
Right now I find the HP dv2 playable if slightly annoying at times, too dependent on a good host and too prone to dropping frames. Just looking for a decent upgrade, I'd much rather be playing on my 20" monitor anyways..


Any recommendations for different graphics cards, heat concerns, PSU suggestions would be welcome. I'm willing to buy used. I"m not entirely sure what PSU I have but I guess I could check that later, its whatever came with the Presario though, and looking at sparepartswarehouse.com it looks to be the 250W PS2 ZINFANDEL REG . If this means anything CSS (CPU intensive right?) runs flawlessly at 60fps for me, and man that is smooth, I would love to have MW2 close that smooth, despite the non-dedi servers -_-.



Basically:

Is it worth it? And will I run into any problems? Thanks. Looking to spend no more than around 50$ in total, but I can possibly be stretched to $60-70ish TOTAL including shipping, tax, and everything.
I'm gonna go to MicroCenter tomorrow probably to look around, but won't buy anything unless I see a deal similar to what I want/what I've seen a few weeks ago, which is a 6800 level GPU for around 30-40 bucks.
 
In the NVidia world, the 6200 is about the only "reasonably-priced" option. Yeah, I have a hard time justifying spending that much on an AGP card.

If you are going to spend more than that, it's probably time to buil a new (PCI-E) PC.
 
Thanks for the response.

That's definitely true, but I don't want to spring on a case, PSU, mobo, and everything else you know? All I have a is a stock desktop, no other parts at all.

I"m going to be getting a high-end laptop in a few months with the 5870 mobility (roughly a 5770 desktop equivalent, slightly worse) and so I figure that till then I'll just pop in a new video card into the good'ol AGP desktop and I should be good to go. I need the laptop later for portability; the desktop I'm gonna be upgrading is a family computer anyways so I guess I"ll be helping out the family? haha, and it'll tide me over for a few months.

According to Youtube/random review sites at least, the P4HT with a mild overclock and a 3650 or 4650 actually does run cod:mw2 pretty well at a constant 40+ FPS, so I guess thats what I"ll be doing. I feel like I can pull even more FPS out of the setup than some of the other kiddies who were turning on AA/physics effects which kills the P4. They also turned on extra texture resolutions lol. I might need to buy a ~$40 Antec PSU though, which brings the total cost to around 110$ish depending on which card I finally decide on. Not bad for extending the life of this 7 year old computer haha (nobody plays graphic-intensive games except for me, and now they can't watch HD stuff without the computer crapping out on them). This computer will pretty much be used until it physically shuts down and won't work anymore.

I actually have a separate question now which I might make another thread on.
It shows up on all websites that HIS has a DDR3 variant of its AGP Radeon 4650, while all the other ones from other manufacturers are DDR2. But I've been reading in some places that there are no more DDR3 Radeon 4650s except for the Biostar (PCI-E, 512MB) version, but at the same time there is no mention of the HIS AGP versions (having 1 gb of memory) NOT having DDR3 in any comments, or forums, or anything. HIS's official website along with every vendor lists it as DDR3 as well and Google has been no help to me. If its DDR3, I'll spend the extra 20$ or so and go ahead and get the HIS, because the performance difference and heat savings is pretty big, otherwise I'm gonna buy a cheaper XFX with DDR2.
 
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Check Ebay and pick-up a GF 7600 GS or GT, or Radeon X1650 Pro or GT, for as cheap as you can from a reputable seller with a warranty or DOA guarantee. Either of them will be MASSIVE improvement over GeForce FX5200.
 
Yeah, thanks for the responses. pretty big botleneck.

So I bought a HIS DDR3 1GB version of the 4650, which should have been pretty badass. Only the card doesn't fit into my AGP slot on my mobo? wth.

My mobo, the Asus P4SD-LA Oxford (according to Belarc at least), is supposed to support AGP 8x/4x. The card is AGP 8x 3.0, but it doesn't fit.

Any cards that will fit? I'm pretty disappointed. Probably just going to scrap this thought and keep playing MW2 on my 12" laptop...unfortunately.

Also bought a new 450w PSU for it but I guess I'll be returning that too, hopefully Microcenter aren't bitches about me returning stuff...sigh.
 
Yeah, the card and slot were keyed differently, which was weird.
I was under the impression that my motherboard was 4x/8x so any 8x AGP card would work but I guess thats not the case?


My slot was keyed into three sections, with a 3,3v and 1,5v connector thing I think, while the HIS 4650 was keyed into two sections.
 
JK EVERYONE, the HIS 4650 does actually fit like I thought it would..
I have an extremely stubborn agp port it turns out and I had to pop out some parts of the case and then put them back in but yeah it fits. Hopefully it works/doesn't have driver issues and stuff
 
wow 3.8ghz, i totally forgot they had stuff like that. so yea 2.8ghz is pretty dead. p4 was a dog.
and yea its amusing to see old systems in charts, they should do that more often as a reference point.
 
Get used. I upgraded my parents' P4 with a 6600 GT mostly to use Aero with Win7, and it plays older DX9 games better than my HTPC. It was $20.

Mind you, I said older DX9 games. You probably need something a bit better than that to play MW2, but who knows.
 
I have a radeon x1650 in my p4 system. Works nice for 2005 games and older. Even runs newer ones on low. Fan is super loud though.
 
fuzzymath10 said:
Get used. I upgraded my parents' P4 with a 6600 GT mostly to use Aero with Win7, and it plays older DX9 games better than my HTPC. It was $20.

Mind you, I said older DX9 games. You probably need something a bit better than that to play MW2, but who knows.
Click to expand...

yea back when i had a 6600gt and pentium d it would choke on even cs source, though standards are a bit higher for frame rate on that game, it worked best in forced dx81 mode, it was pretty slow. i'm pretty any modern game woulda raped it hard.
 
Hey everyone, thanks for all the replies to this thread

Well it turned out pretty good I must say. I was able to plop in the 4650 and after Steam shitted out on me and made me re-download the whole game despite installing off disk as an "update" I finally got to test-play it today. I had fraps on in the background for frame rates.

I've only had one playing session but I set the res to 1280x800, all effects were off by default so I left them there, and I set textures to high and specular and normal map to low. AA off. For some reason the default settings were textures extra, spec/normal map high, but that was giving me frame rates from 30-60ish, not that great for online, so I switched it up.


After the change it was smooth as butter. The framerate rarely dipped below 50 if ever and went as high as 90, so I"m pleasantly surprised, probably hovered more around the 60-80 range. I might try tweaking with AA and specular/normal map or maybe some effects but I find it extremely playable to say the least. Going from 12" to 22" does wonders for me online too, I'm noticeably playing a lot better with the additional frames + larger screen space.

So yeah. 2.8gHz P4 + ATI 1GB DDR3 4650 + 1.5GBddr = runs MW2 quite well, imo, given the expectations. The overall playing experience was comparable to my friend's desktop who runs a 3.xgHz duo and a GTX 260 along with a 22" monitor like myself, except it was missing A LOT of bells and whistles but still enjoyable. His rig is around 7 years newer though, though surprisingly they cost around the same in each time period, a funny coincidence, though mine was prebuilt and he built his.

It also kicks ass on CSS, I didn't know the graphics were actually somewhat decent cause I've never seen the game looking like this before lol. I was able to turn on all effects, all high settings, trilinear filtering and 4xMSAA @1440x1000 (or some similiar res) and get framerates hovering in the 60-90s.


I ending up spending 30$ for the 450w CoolerMaster PSU (huge sale @ microcenter) and another $80 for the 1GB DDR3 AGP version of the 4650. $110 spent in total, and I think it was worth it, I can leave the computer as is now until I get a completely new kickass one in awhile.


I'm going to try an overclock on the P4 to try and get it to ~3.2ish and see if that helps framerates with higher settings/res or lets me turn on some effects on MW2, which I can only assume are CPU intensive. (Mostly want shadows/bullet impacts to help me out online)

Any tips for a first time OC-er? (and on a P4 no less, lol)
 
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It is pretty low, but looks pretty good to me surprisingly.
I was surprised too.

Native is 1680x1050, I can probably crank up the res but I"ll experiment with that later. I don't think I played a game where I was the host but I"m guessing that would shit on the framerates so I'll report that too later. I'll crank up res/effects and stuff as long as the framerates never dip below 40, or very rarely do at least. FPS is hugely important to me, and gameplay is buttery smooth right now so that's great.

Overall its still better than expected, and miles better than the the old laptop I was playing on.
 
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