The sorriest mobo avaible!?!....

[SithSolo1]

link

This is my friends curent Mobo.

Should he get a new mobo or a new vid card? He only has the money for one. He is using the onboard video now but has a spare 32MB TNT2/M64.

 

[caino]

keep the mobo and use the TNT2 in it if you want to save money...

there's nothing wrong with that mobo...and the tnt2 you can still use for gaming...

caino

 

[SithSolo1]

he wants more than 40FPS constant in CS at a resolution higher 640x480x16 and neither the onboard graphics or the TNT2 is cutting it

 

[SithSolo1]

His main concren is only the 2 pci slots.

 

[SithSolo1]

i was mistaken. He has a PC Chips M810 basically the same thing, different company

 

[Belegost]

Ummm... with the really minimal information you've given, I would say video card. But, if he has a slow CPU, or low RAM maybe one of those.

 

[Lehmann]

Oh my god, I'm so sorry. From a moral standpoint I would say you absolutely need to replace that motherboard! PC Chips is a company that will forever be ingrained in my mind as the most pathetic company ever! If you can only get a new mobo or a new video card, then go with an MSI KM133M. It's S3 onboard video should be about as good as the TNT64 M64 (almost), but having a quality motherboard will make everything much much better. Also, this board has an AGP slot, so you can do a cheap upgrade to an AGP video card in the future (AGP isn't much faster than PCI for modern video cards, but it's hard to find a decent PCI card from a reputable manufacturer).

John

 

[SithSolo1]

he's got an X-gamer 5.1 Sound card, a 900mhz TB, and 384MB PC133 ram

 

[SithSolo1]

onboard sound is not a must have.
Onboard video or lan would be nice

wants more PCI slots
a DDr board is ok as he can trade the pc133 for DDr

 

[Boonesmi]

if he is wanting to play cs or other games then onboard video isnt a very good choice

 

[Peter]

If it's a PC-Chips M810LMR, then there is some performance sleeping in it - hop over to the PC-Chips Lottery site, and grab the "tweaker's BIOS" for it. That's the same BIOS as shipped, but with many chipset configuration tweaky bits unhidden to play with. People have been reporting performance increases from nil to 35 percent, depending on what they do with it.

Besides, a TNT2-M64, also being a very memory bandwidth compromised "budget" solution, doesn't do much better in performance than does the integrated unit ...

regards, Peter

 

[SithSolo1]

nope, he doesn't have the LMR version

 

[SithSolo1]

I was thinking he could get a decent SDRAM or DDr mobo and a GF1 or GF2MX.

 

[Peter]

The LMR suffix just says that the board came with LAN onboard and that there was an AMR modem in the box. All M810 flavors share the same BIOS, it's just that enabling the LAN unit on a non-L board will be sort of useless.

regards, Peter