My upgrade path

[Giscardo]

I want to play Far Cry. My current system:
Athlon (TBird) 1.2 o'ced to 1.38
256megs PC133 at ~159mhz
IWILL KK266
GF2MX

I've had this system for three years and it's served me quite nicely. I want to play Far Cry asap (probably with lower detail settings). So I'm thinking that I need to upgrade the video card. If I could find one of the 256bit 9800SE's so that I can unlock the other 4 pipes, that would be great, but not sure if those are still around to be bought.

I want to spend around 130$ max right now. What video card should I get to suit my needs?

I know the Ti4200s are pretty cheap, well within my current budget but would that be as good for Far Cry? I would consider modding and/or overclocking a video card to get it to perform higher, but not spending any more than 130.

I will upgrade the CPU later on in the summer, maybe to an A64 or a mobile athlon and overclock that, or perhaps some Intel chip, whatever's best bang for buck at the time. That will mean new mobo, PowerSup., and RAM.

 

[Alkaline5]

Regardless of your video card, you'll need at least another 256M of RAM before you even need to think about playing Far Cry.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

thats true man.......any rig used for games should have AT LEAST 512...heck UT2004 needs around 1gig to play smoothly
PC133 is gettin on abit too.......u can pick up DDR for the same price nowadays.

i have this rig......xp 2000 @ 1.7ghz, 512 DDR266 (which is 133mhz clock but DDR makes it effectively 266mhz) 2x40Gb WD HDD and a very nice 9500pro..........far cry is nigh unplayable on my rig.....were talkin low 20's in the fps camp for medium settings.....lowing the res helps but the bandwidth the cpu and ram provide jus isnt enough

i would save and go for a complete new rig



EDIT.....man im such a sputz.....jus read that ur planning new cpu n stuff later.....but still u need more ram before u buy a new video card and a ti4200 may jus suffice.....my 9500pro certainly has a hard time...well the rest of my system does.

 

[Tango57]

right now you're running just the minimum system requirements for the game. if you upgrade your card now, from what i've read of other's experiences with the game, you'll need something like an ati 9700/geforce 5700 equivalent or higher to run it decently and that's with some eye candy turned off. with the newer cards coming out now, you should see some more prices drop in the next couple of weeks on cards in the range of the 9800 pro etc.