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Which is the better upgrade?

S

Sleek

Member
I was wondering what would be the better upgrade. A GeForce 3 Ti 200, another 256mb stick of DDR RAM, or an Athlon XP 1800+? Here are the parts I currently have:

Athlon Thunderbird 1.2ghz running at 1.3ghz
VisionTek Geforce 2 Ultra
256mb of Crucial DDR RAM (1 stick)
 
For gaming, video card then processor then RAM.

The GF3 has more features and better clocking than even your Ultra. Your 3dmk2k1
scores will get more of a bump than they would with the processor upgrade.

Some of my results:

Athlon 1.33 + GF2gts pro = 4100
XP1700 + GF2gts pro = 4400
XP1700 + R8500 = 8500
XP1900 + R8500 = 8700

 
not a very good question
what are you doing with this machine?
what OS are you running?
the gef2 ultra is still a pretty good card for games
the 1800+ is about 233Mhz faster than your current overclock performance increase maybe 8-10%
windows 98 will typically use 196Mb of ram maximum
 
If you notice your HDD doing a lot of 'swapping' as you switch programs (not opening new ones, that doesn't count), then RAM will help reduce those times. If you notice slight 'pauses' when you are playing games, then the video card will help with that. You've gotta know what you want to upgrade it 🙂.
 


<< not a very good question
what are you doing with this machine?
what OS are you running?
 >>


Sorry, I forgot to do that. I'm a gamer, hardcore if you will 😀. I'm using Windows 2k Pro.If i go with the videocard, I'm thinking of getting a GAINWARD/CARDEXPERT GeForce 3 Ti200 128MB (NVIDIA GeForce3 Ti 200 GPU), Power Pack Golden Sample, ( 4ns 128MB DDR. ). (Copied from Newegg) Is this a good choice?
 
I've got the 64MB Gainward GeForce 3 Ti200 Golden Sample from newegg, an epox 8kha+, and 256MB Crucial PC2100.
I'm very happy with it. But I upgraded from a PCI Voodoo 3 with a K6-2 380, so it was a huge improvement.

I've never used a Geforce 2, so I don't know how much of a jump in performance you will get.

I agree that if you are a gamer, the video card would be a much better upgrade then cpu or ram.

How much do you want to spend? The GF4's seem to be dropping in price quite a bit. Newegg had some good deals on the 4400's and they are supposed to be quite a bit faster than the GF3's.
 
I say save your money. If you're looking for a small upgrade, buy more RAM. More Ram in games is always good. Your 1.2 and Ultra will last you at least another 6 months to 1 year until it starts seriously chugging on the newer games. Wait a few Nvidia cycles before you upgrade - maybe we'll have a Geforce 5 then. THEn the upgrade might be worthwhile.
 
Why not look at an ATI Radeon 8500? It's a good upgrade at a sweet price right now. That is the card that I would put in your machine. Are you stuck on Nvidia or are you open to a different card cause I don't know if you would notice a whole lot of difference between your GF2 Ultra and the GF3 Ti200(unless you overclock it and then you could get to TI500 levels which would be worth it). I usually like to jump 2 generations in video cards if possible cause they cost so much each time. Ram and a faster cpu would help but if you're a gamer, a video card is generally the better upgrade unless your current cpu is a bottleneck, which it doesn't seem to be the case here.
 
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