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Two quick questions

D

DarrylLicke

Member
Okay...running a P3 733 on a Asus P3V4X. Its got a Voodoo5500 what has some fried memory but still works after an initial failed post. 256MB of RAM.

Can this system handle WinXP or should I stick with 98se?

What is the best vid card I can upgrade too that won't bog down the system? I thought for going for the best at the time I made the computer (summer 2000) but that didn't seem to help much?

Thoughts.
 
Your questions are not 100% clear to me, but I'll try to answer them anyway.

1) I would not go for XP, but since you can trim some of it's fancy shmancy graphics, it may work. 256 RAM is enough, but does not give you a lot of breathing room.
However, if you want the stability, why not give Windows 2000 a chance? I've run it very successfully on smaller systems than yours (667 Pentium III and 128 MB Ram).

2) What do you mean "bog down the system"? Do you mean that you don't want to overspend on a card that will then only bottleneck your CPU? Well, the P3 733 is not that bad of a CPU, so I am thinking anything in the area of a Radeon 7500, GeForce 3 Ti 200 (if you can find one), to a Radeon 8500 would not be a bad idea. It really depends on what you want to be doing with this computer. Don't get any card without a T&L unit, e.g. GeForce MX, Radeon 7000, or similar - those require your CPU to do MORE work. However, a Radeon 8500LE (or even OEM, which is often clocked even lower) will work well despite costing not much more. The reason is that it HAS the T&L unit, but not excessively high clockings, which you would not need.

I hope that makes sense.
 
It should be fine; I initially had suggested a beefy system for WinXP based on a PC here at home; then I benchmarked the hard drive and found that it was dying. ATA66 drive that was maxing out at around 1.2MB/sec sustained or something close to that...some downright pathetic figure.
RAM is what Windows loves the best. You should be ok with 256MB, but I don't know how many windows you usually use, or how many background apps you have open at once. I've got one window of IE, and 2 instances of Eudora, plus some background apps, and that already uses up 257MB; I've got 512MB in my system. PC100/133 RAM is pretty cheap these days.

What kind of budget do you have in mind for a new videocard? I don't know much about the Radeon line; maybe an 8500 or 9000 would suffice, but I really don't know about those. In the nVidia realm, you can probably get a Geforce3 for ~$70 in the forums here. They have the advanced effects that the Geforce4MX lacks; I don't have any links for benchmarks comparing the two. Or you could even go for a Geforce4 Ti4x00 card; most people would probably recommend getting a 128MB card though if you go this route; this ups the price-range a bit though.
 
I have a 733mhz system w/ 768mb ram and WinXP ran beautifully, I took it off though for other reasons. You should upgrade your memory, 256mb is the bare minimum for XP. If you don't plan on doing a whole lot, you'll be fine, otherwise add atleast another 128mb to your system 🙂

Bill
 
XP runs acceptably on 128 for those who don't multitask too much 😉

I've run XP happily on a TBird 750 with 256Mb ram and a Radeon 7200.
That said, upgrading to 512Mb ram made a large difference.
 
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