What Video Card to Get for an Athlon XP 2000+

[Incursion]

I have an Athlon XP 2000+ with a Geforce 3 Ti 200. Which vid card would be the best to get? I don't want to buy something that will be waiting on my CPU all the time.

 

[SneakyStuff]

GeForce 4 Ti 4200 AGP8x (because of the faster speeds, not the interface) That just comes to mind, and if you wanna overclock that sucker, just get a Radeon 9800 Pro.

 

[Incursion]

Wouldn't the 9800 Pro be useless on my system since everything would be CPU limited?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Incursion
Wouldn't the 9800 Pro be useless on my system since everything would be CPU limited?

The XP2000+ is still a pretty decent processor.

The "CPU limited" argument is pretty silly to me, since if you're CPU-limited, that just means you can run at higher resolutions or with better IQ settings on for "free". The only thing it will really hurt is your benchmark scores, or your FPS at relatively low resolutions and without AA/AF.

 

[Incursion]

So what kind of frame rates could I expect at 1280x1024 in UT2004 and Far Cry with a 9800 Pro? Could I get a sustained rate of 30 FPS?

 

[SneakyStuff]

lol in short yes, I get about 50-60 fps with my setup, and thats with a geforce fx 5700u. Excpect higher

 

[Incursion]

Yeah, but what kind of CPU do you have? I'm running a XP 2000+ with 512 MB of DDR PC2100 and a RAID 0 config with Maxtor D740Xs on a SOYO Dragon Plus! (the original one... KT266A chipset)

 

[pukemon]

Originally posted by: Incursion
So what kind of frame rates could I expect at 1280x1024 in UT2004 and Far Cry with a 9800 Pro? Could I get a sustained rate of 30 FPS?

I sure hope so... the 9800Pro is a very nice card for the money.

If you're running an LCD screen, you could just drop the resolution to 1024x768 and get "free antialiasing"

 

[Incursion]

I'm on a LCD, but I don't want to go below native resolution.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

Originally posted by: Incursion
So what kind of frame rates could I expect at 1280x1024 in UT2004 and Far Cry with a 9800 Pro? Could I get a sustained rate of 30 FPS?

i have a xp2000 512 ram and i used to have a 9500pro in that machine.....i was gettin 25-35fps average and the lowest frames i saw for a signifcant time were below 15FPS.......ut is a very cpu hungry game, but somehow for me anyway 20fps is really playable......i have jus slipped a ti200 in that rig and the frames havent changed 1 bit.........the ti has half the pipes, is 100mhz slower and have half the memory which is also slower and it gives me the same FPS.....most games are cpu limited at low res, and my monitor with that above rig wont reliabley do over 1024x768....so i had the eye candy turned all the way up!!! for free!!