upgrading matrox G400 to newer card on athlon600

[maartencannaerts]

Hi everyone,

I own a three year old athlon 600Mhz system, 256mb ram, msi 6167 mobo, a (one year old) ibm deskstar 120 GB,
winXP prof...
I currently have a matrox G400 max installed.

I currently play Medal of Honor and Simcity4, and would like to play unreal 2 in the future.
As is to be expected, the G400 is not really up to its task
Buying a new computer is going to happen in about 6months to one year.

I was wondering if upgrading my video card at this moment would be useful... Is there any point in buying a radeon 9700 or nvidia FX with such an old system?
All the benchmarking on review-sites is performed with P4 2.6+ GHz, so I guess not really realistic in my case ;-)

So, anyone out there who knows how useful this upgrade would be? Is there another possibility I should look at?
(I don't want 180 fps in Unreal2 or simcity4... just 30 fps at 1024*768 would be fine...)

obviously, I would want to reuse this new card in the new computer in about 6 months...
however, if there will be virtually no improvement on my current system, I would rather wait and buy the newer video card together with the new computer.


Thanks for any suggestions you guys may have...

Best regards,

Maarten.

 

[rogue1979]

If you don't need 180fps in your games, then don't spend the money on a Radeon 9700. Geforce4 Ti4200 128MB or Radeon 9500 Pro. Heck you could save a bunch of money and go for a Radeon 8500 64MB. Any of these cards will be seriously cpu limited on your current system, but will still give you a huge boost in 3D performance over the Matrox. With a faster cpu the Radeon 8500 64MB will handle modern games smoothly at 1600 x 1200 with no FSAA, or 1024 x 768 at 4X.

 

[rogue1979]

Almost forgot, welcome to Anandtech Forums

 

[Serp86]

for that processor, a geforce 2 pro would be max - anyhting higher and you won't notice any difference. So - you should just get the cheapest vid card available for now as they all outperform the geforce 2 (i think)

Since you want it to last for an upgrade, you may want to get something more, even though you won't use it at this moment - i suggest you get a radeon 9000 pro 128 meg. It's pointless to get a 9700. with that money, you can get a xp 2000+ rig and a rad 9000 and would notice much higher performance. Also, by six months, the 9700 should be down to about $200.

hope this helped