New Video Card, any point?

[borris]

Hi I'm looking to improve my systems performance for gaming but unfortunately i have a Pentium3 @558 Mhz combined with a GF1 ddr. I was thinking of getting a new video card to cheer it up but i borrowed my friends GF2 GTS and only got 5 extra FPS or so (in Q3 at 1024.768). Has anyone got any results from putting a GF3Ti200 or better video card in a sub 600 mhz PC, if so did it work and is it worth it.
For some reason no one does benchmarks using older CPUs so buyers know what they're really getting.
Cheers for any help.
Borris

 

[loafbred]

This might help

 

[Rand]

Forget a new video card, your very much processor limited even with a GeForce DDR, with anything more the video card will effectively be sitting around waiting for the processor to feed data to it. Your totally processor bottlenecked... if you want better gaming performance look towards a processor upgrade.

 

[Basie]

Rand is correct. Even my old ATI Radeon64mb Vivo called for a 600mz + Processor.

 

[MangoX]

he is right. you are totally processor bottlenecked. i once had a amd k6-2 300 and was running a matrox mystique 220 4mb pci at the time and i installed my friends creative tnt2 ultra and actually saw performance slow downs. if you were to install a geforce 3 you pretty much need a 1ghz+ cpu to get more performance out of the processor.

 

[borris]

Ouch!! i was dreading this news. New video card about £150 i can stretch to that but a new cpu thus new Motherboard + new Ram not so sure, nevermind i dream. that new P4 1.6A looks like it might have potential maybe if i save

 

[Z24]

I have a PIII-700. Went to GF3 Ti200 and didn't get much increase. 1.6A / P4B266 / Crucial DDR is on it's way

 

[nRollo]

Why don't you buy an Athlon/motherboard? Then you wouldn't necessarily need new RAM, and you could double your cpu power for the money you're talking about. You might not even need a new vga then.

 

[Z24]

why? because a 1.6A (Northwood) is pretty much guaranteed to hit over 2.2 Ghz.

edit: and it requires less cooling than a comparable athlon, so it's quieter.

 

[TheWart]

get a new proc and you will be much happier even with a gf2.

 

[spoma]

For $200 you could get an ECS K7S5A motherboard a 1GHz processor and a solid GF2 vga card. you would seee huge performance difference with something like this and you owuld not have to upgrade your RAM until you were ready.

 

[scoobydooby]

<< why? because a 1.6A (Northwood) is pretty much guaranteed to hit over 2.2 Ghz. >>


That's great but in this case it looks like he'd be better off with a duron to save money. He could probably get a used GTS w/ a duron + motherboard for fairly cheap.
Scoob

 

[borris]

I think a new processor is in order. I just want to make sure that if i upgrade my cpu + motherboard that i won't have to do it again to play doom3 or similarlly advanced game in a years time or whenever such games slip to.
I have always thought that big upgrades once every two/three years would be cheaper than smaller ones every 8-12 months. Maybe when the Ti420 has been out and fallen in price a little i'll get that with either a northwood or XP i guess. For the time being less takeaways and pints (at £2.50 a go (u gotta love london)) for me

 

[loafbred]

I can give you a little perspective on what a GeForce3 TI 500 alone would do. The article I linked in the second post showed the P III-550, not overcloclocked, getting 4252 in 3DMark 2001. I have a T-Bird 1.4, KT133a w/SDRAM, and a GF2 Pro, and I get 4300 points. I haven't gone throught the individual tests in 3DMark to see where the advantages and disadvantages of each are, but I should be able to tell you tonight what a GF3 Ti200 will do on with a P III 550 @ 733 as far as playability. I just got a Gainward for for my bro-in-law's, and plan to install it in a couple of hours. It is also presently using a GF 256 DDR.

 

[Rand]

<< I can give you a little perspective on what a GeForce3 TI 500 alone would do. The article I linked in the second post showed the P III-550, not overcloclocked, getting 4252 in 3DMark 2001. I have a T-Bird 1.4, KT133a w/SDRAM, and a GF2 Pro, and I get 4300 points. I haven't gone throught the individual tests in 3DMark to see where the advantages and disadvantages of each are, but I should be able to tell you tonight what a GF3 Ti200 will do on with a P III 550 @ 733 as far as playability. I just got a Gainward for for my bro-in-law's, and plan to install it in a couple of hours. It is also presently using a GF 256 DDR. >>



I don't think that's a viable comparison, the GF3 can run the Nature test in 3DM2001 which the GF2 Pro cannot, which autmoatically gives the GF3 approximately a 1000 point advantage, plus almost all of the game tests in 3DM2001 are specifically optimized for vertex shading, and a few for pixel shaders whereas only an extremely small handful of real world games are and even those small number that do support it arent optimized anywhere near the extent to which 3DM2001 is.

Real world games would show a dramatically different picture then 3DMark 2001 would on the systems you specified.

 

[loafbred]

I was pretty surprised at how well it ran. I didn't run 3DMark benchmark, but I did run the demo, and it was smoother than my GF2 Pro with 1.4 T Bird. I played some Quake 3, Serious Sam, and Max Payne, and it was very smooth with high details - no halts or stutters or heavy slowdowns. Granted, the P III 733 is running 133 fsb, which probably helps a good bit. I used the reference 23.11 driver w/Win98.

 

[nRollo]

"Why? because a 1.6A (Northwood) is pretty much guaranteed to hit over 2.2 Ghz."
Because a 1.6a costs more, and the motherboards costs more. Overclocking isn't "guaranteed". A 1.4GHz Athlon, that he can for sure use his old RAM with, is as fast at gaming as a P4 2Ghz.
And I'm just guessing a man with a p3-558 isn't long on money...fair enough?

 

[GeForceG]

I would suggest a GeForce 2 Ultra or Ti.
This would be the best for your system. A GeForce 3 will require too much out of it.
Unless you can get a CPU upgrade, then stick with what I suggested. You can get the Gainward GeForce 2 Ti for cheap now. Not sure exactly how much.

 

[borris]

I've been reading in the CPU/overclocking forum about peoples results with the P41.6A and a ASUS P4S333 that i looked at the cost and it's about 330 with some pc2400 ram.
I'm thinking maybe a begging letter is in order to the parents. Then maybe my DDR GF1 might be able to kick out a few more frames. Of course it'd be a bottle neck till the new shiny GF4's come down in price but i guess one step at a time.

 

[docknload]

You could always just buy a P3 1G and use the same mobo, ram, video etc. I dont know how much they are but it should be cheaper than buying a whole new system, though I dont know.