New ATI 9500 question

[Riviera]

Ok, I'm going to upgrade my aging GF2 GTS, hopefully to an ATI 9500 Pro which eveyone here seems to rave about. To start off, my system specs currently are -

Dell 4100 Dimension (about 2 yrs old)
PIII 933
384Mb PC133 Ram
20Gb HD (probably 5400rpm)
GF2 GTS 32Mb
Intel MotherBoard - D815EEA (taken from 3DMark2001SE)
Updated BIOS A11
Win XP Home Edition
SoundBlaster Value Live

Current 3D2001SE mark of around 3170.

Firstly, would I see much improvement in graphics speed or should a processor/motherboard change be first in this case?

Secondly, I was going to go for a GF4 Ti4200 but having read the comments on this and other sites it seems that I should go for the ATI 9500 Pro. Given my current processor, which is going to be better?

Thirdly, I have sourced a nicely priced ATI 9500 here in the UK but it doesn't say it's a Pro version and when I rang the company they had no indication that it was a Pro version. However, I am led to believe that only the Pro version has 128Mb of Ram which this card has, so therefore is it a Pro version?

Help!

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/SpecPage/NOV-A9500

Cheers,

Riv.

 

[kylebisme]

first off i am almost positive card on the link you provided is not a pro and therefore not nearly the card you are looking for. second, a lot of people try to make us read more into the cpu issue than there realy is to it. the 9500 pro is respectably more powerful than a ti4200 and will show that regarless of the cpu power behind it in most any situation, this tends to hold true for video cards in general. while it is true that the preformace gap tends to increase as it is given more cpu power; that fact should not be used to discount the benifits of a beter preforming card on a slower cpu. that being said, compared to your GF2 GTS 32Mb even a 9500 would be a respectable improvment but at 9500 pro would blow you out of the water.

 

[CamNeely]

The regular Radeon 9500 comes in 64 and 128mb versions. The 9500 pro has a 128mb version only. here's a board layout to compare against.