upgrading a friend's pc

[TechBoyJK]

I posted this in motherboards, but I'm not sure if that was the best topic..

My friend has an HP computer and he wants to upgrade the video card so he can play some games. I looked up his model computer and HP.com says the machine has 8x AGP.

However, I ran the program "cpuz" and it reported only 4x AGP.

The motherboard model lines up with what the vendor says, so I'm not sure who to believe.

The guy gave me $60 to find him a good 8x 256/512MB card. he just wants to be able to play some older games, like Doom3, FarCRY, BioShock, etc. he has a 2.4Ghz AthlonXP with 2GB of ddr400 ram. Not the best, but it should play each game on moderate settings.

Here is the card I'm looking at.

Radeon X1650 Pro 512MB

it is an AGP 8x. I know it will work if it is 4X on his MB... how much of a performance hit will he take if it is only 4x??

 

[CurseTheSky]

What resolution is the monitor?

I was able to play Doom 3 fairly well (moderate settings) on my 6800 GT back in the day at 1600x1200, but I had a faster processor (X2 4200+ @ 2.7GHz). The X1650 Pro is NOT a powerful card, but it should be slightly faster than my 6800 GT was. Will it run Doom 3 and FarCry? Yeah. Will he be able to turn up the eye candy enough to loop pretty? Probably not. If he can spend an extra $15-20ish, an HD3650 or HD4650 might be a better choice, though depending on the resolution, the processor might be a horrible bottleneck.

If it's truly only AGP 4x, he'll probably be better off doing a CPU / motherboard / memory / graphics card upgrade altogether, I'm sorry to say.

 

[cusideabelincoln]

If the video card he currently has is a 4x card then it's probably making the slot run at 4x.

There is no standard 2.4 GHz Athlon XP processor. They topped out at around 2.2 GHz, so he would have to overclock to get 2.4 GHz and I doubt he can overclock on an HP system. So are you saying he has the 2400+, which runs at about 2.00 GHz? You will be CPU-limited with just a 2400+. The X1650 Pro is a good fit for the system and definitely don't use a faster card than the HD3650 or 4650.

 

[alcoholbob]

Forget about Bioshock, you need a dual core to run that game, I upgraded from a 3200+ to an X2 4200+ solely for the purpose of that game because it was a stutter fest.

Doom 3 should not really pose a problem even on high settings, in fact Doom 3 was the first game that I could not max at 1600x1200 with a 9700 Pro (it ran at a paltry 31fps, something that's considered impressive for Crysis these days).

Far Cry is no problem, it definitely posed a problem for the Geforce 4 generation but that card has been lapped several times over.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

For only approx $170 you can get an Athlon 2 X2, 4GB of DDR2, a new motherboard and a decent GPU (4650/70). That kills most games these days. Especially if his monitor is 1280x1024 or lower.

Coming from a 3500+ and a x1650pro a few builds ago, it's worth it completely. An Athlon XP will NOT perform decent enough in most games.

Edit: I didn't factor the Ram into the price. Still, for $230 it's worth the literal 5-10x performance gain.

http://i290.photobucket.com/al...Scholzpdx/230build.jpg