Upgrade Advice Needed...

[no1hokie]

Just wondering if I could solicit a little advice for a gift I plan on giving this Christmas. I tried to read up on the forum here, plus a few reviews here and on other sites. Unfortunately, I'm getting old and am now easily confused. ;-(

The gift would be going into a system with the following:

250W Enlight PS
MSI K7T Turbo2
256 MB RAM (might be 512MB)
Duron 750

I'm also considering hooking the recipient up with a faster processor, but I can't figure out whether to go with a Radeon 9000 Pro 128, Radeon 8500 LE 128, or one of the nvidia 4200 cards.

Are there any problems with insufficient power for any of these cards? I'd like to keep the cost below $150, so I've basically ruled out the 9500 Pro for that reason.

Any general advice? TIA.

 

[dguy6789]

Ok, first off i highly recommend at least a power supply of 300W. I dont know of any new video card at all that will run on 250W. But if you wanna try, i would recommend the Radeon 9000 Pro 128 Mb. It has a few weaknesses, but has more memory bandwith then either the 4200 or 8500. Once you get the catalyst 2.5 drivers, the card will fly. It has all the dx8 features and a powerful vertex shader.

(for those wanting ot know bandwith:
Geforce 4 Ti4200 64MB: 8.0GB/s
Radeon 9000 Pro 128MB: 9.6GB/s
Geforce 4 Ti4200 128MB: 7.1GB/s
Radeon 8500: 8.8GB/s

Remeber bandwith is not the only factor in performance, but the more bandwith you have, the less hit on performance anti aliasing and other things will have.

For instance a game that uses a lot of fill rate, the 9000 Pro is slower then all of em. the 8500 is the best mix of both worlds, but the ti4200 is faster in texturing and fill rate then either one. Most games out now use a lot of fill rate and texturing. But thats just now, in the near future, games are going to use insanely high polygon counts, which the 9000 pro accels in past all of them.

For me, i like the 9000 Pro, in ut2003 at 1024X768, highest settings, i get amazing framerates that dont blink or studder. and ut2003 is the most graphically intensive game out there for now. Im not trying to be biased, but ive had nothing but good with my r9000 pro, infact i used to use a ti4200 untill now. So go ahead and get whatever suits you. Again, try and get at least a 300W power supply.

Hope this helps.