Upgrading Vidcard on a 4 year old machine

N

NickZhao

n00b
Joined
Aug 13, 2005
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3
Hey guys,
I have a Dell Dimension 8100, and i can hardly play any game, even on low settings
The specs are:
250Watt PSU for continous power (runs at 345watts max)
P4 1.5 ghz willamette
A proprietory i850 mobo
Some PCI sound card by creative
GeForce 2 MMX 32 megs
CD drive

I want to upgrade my video card for around $150 without busting the PSU

Help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks,
Nick
 
I'd say get a 9600 Pro and save the rest for a full upgrade. Or a used 9800 Pro. The 9800 should be ok, I don't think it'd blow your psu.

What games are you trying to play?
 
get a geforce 6800 or an radeon x800 pro for good solid midrange agp performance, the radeon being a better overall performer. either can be had in the 150-200 dollar range. if you wanna blow your wad, then get a 6800 ultra or x850xt. people who post after this are gonna talk about how, oh man, those cards are totally gonna be bottlenecked by the cpu and not perform to their full potential!!! true, but its always always best to get the best card you are willing to purchase. always. though they are bottlenecked on your current system, they will still trounce any cards that won't be bottlenecked, like a 9600pro or something. and you can carry the card over with you to a new system, like say, a socket 939 athlon 64 combined with an asrock dual sata2 motherboard (fully and completely supports both pci express and agp cards without any performance loss).

edit* oops, just noticed the powersupply issue....hmm, well in that case i'd say get yourself a geforce 6600 or x700 in the 100-130 dollar range. then get yourself a decent powersupply to go with it, nothing fancy, just something that will give some juice.
 
chameleoneel said:
get a geforce 6800 or an radeon x800 pro for good solid midrange agp performance, the radeon being a better overall performer. either can be had in the 150-200 dollar range. if you wanna blow your wad, then get a 6800 ultra or x850xt. people who post after this are gonna talk about how, oh man, those cards are totally gonna be bottlenecked by the cpu and not perform to their full potential!!! true, but its always always best to get the best card you are willing to purchase. always. though they are bottlenecked on your current system, they will still trounce any cards that won't be bottlenecked, like a 9600pro or something. and you can carry the card over with you to a new system, like say, a socket 939 athlon 64 combined with an asrock dual sata2 motherboard (fully and completely supports both pci express and agp cards without any performance loss).

edit* oops, just noticed the powersupply issue....hmm, well in that case i'd say get yourself a geforce 6600 or x700 in the 100-130 dollar range. then get yourself a decent powersupply to go with it, nothing fancy, just something that will give some juice.
Click to expand...

Yeah, a few years back I put a top-of-the-line 2002 video card in a machine I made in 1999 (64MB Kyro2 lol) and it wasn't even funny. Overheated my computer and made my power supply almost commit seppuku.
 
I had a 1.2ghz tbird system and I went from a G2GTS to a 9800 Pro.. The only increase in performance I saw was in my PSone emulator because of the extra onboard Ram.
 
no no no!

I had a machine excatly liked that with the same cpu P4 1.5 ghz willamette, with 1 gig of ram with a geforce2mx. And I k now it sucked. It got 25 fps in warcraftIII.

I eventually sticked a 9700pro in there. Things got a bit better, but in fights it dropped back down to 20fps at most. Then I finally upgraded to a64 3200+. WOW what a difference. At 2.6ghz and 9700pro its cranking out nearly 60fps at all times. Never dips below 50fps even in fights. So I say get a new cpu, that cpu will choke you to death
 
I had a 1.4GHz Wily system, man that CPU blows ... I didn't know better at the time. The only video card upgrade for that system was a GF2 MX400 to GF4 Ti4200.

You might want to mention what games you intend to play and how much RAM you have too. Depending on those factors, you may just want to save for a whole new PC.
 
i would not put any money into that computer

save up some money and get or build a cheap amd system with like a 3000+ and 1 gig of cheapo ram. then put atleast a 6600GT in it. i just got a 6600GT for $110 after mir and tax/shipping and it runs new games great at 10x7 on a 2500+ barton (upgrade from FX5200)
 
That PC should be put out of its misery and the 423-pin should be disgraced. Wait until you ever get real cash for a whole new system. Otherwise a GeForce FX 5500/5700 or Radeon 9550/9600 would do.
 
Mr. Stryker said:
That PC should be put out of its misery and the 423-pin should be disgraced. Wait until you ever get real cash for a whole new system. Otherwise a GeForce FX 5500/5700 or Radeon 9550/9600 would do.
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Totally agree with him.

 
Geforce 4 mx420 PCI was pimping, played cod, lol, lagged out when nades hit close and lagged out on map stalingrad but it was so pimping.
 
that pc looks way too outdated, putting a new gpu in there would explode the psu and would be too much for the cpu to handle, id sell the pc on ebay and save up at least $600 and build urself a decent gaming pc or $400 for a xbox 360

this might sound a little harsh, but investing new parts in that pc would be a waste of $
 
Mr. Stryker said:
That PC should be put out of its misery and the 423-pin should be disgraced. Wait until you ever get real cash for a whole new system. Otherwise a GeForce FX 5500/5700 or Radeon 9550/9600 would do.
Click to expand...
This is the way to go. I had pretty much the exact same system (not a dell though) from 2001-2004. An I850gb motherboard; 128mb RDRAM; 1.4ghz p4; cdrw; 40gb 5400rpm hard drive; and (get this) a TNT 2 Ultra; and to top it all off.....Windows ME!

The system crawled during games because of the non-existant RAM and puny vid card. I did buy a raedeon 9600 and it made a huge difference. I got playable frame rates at 800x600 for dx9 games and good frame rates at 1024x768 for dx8 titles (of course quality settings were not maxed out). I never did try Quake4; Fear; or Call of Duty 2 on it. But from the sounds of it, you don't play those games. I think a 9600 (pro or non-pro) will probably show a big improvement (maybe not as big as the one I saw...seeing as I upgraded from a tnt 2). After getting the vid card, try to save up at least 600-700 bucks for a new pc.

S.O.
 
for $150 in an AGP slot -

the nVidia 6600 cards with 256 MB RAM.

i just tried upgrading to the ATI X800XT. i had good experience with X850XT on a P5GD, OC'ing 11.1% to 4 GHz. consumes a lot of electricity though, that machine is for running 3D studio Max.

on my AGP machine, an Asus p4C800 with a 3.0 P4 OC'd to 3.3 with Mushkin 2-2-2, i run 2 industrial strength CAD programs, Cocreate One Space Designer & Solidworks.

I have Pro-E on another machine ... but we won't talk about that one ;-) not a big pro-E fan.

anyway, the p4C did not like the X800XT. ran slower than the nVidia 5600 it was supposed to replace.

the 6600 is working good. with 20 browser windows open & 2 CAD programs running, it hasn't crashed yet.
 
I agree with getting a 9600pro for ~$50 used or ~$75 new considering your cpu will choke any video card faster than that. If you want a faster video card your going to want to biuld an entirely new system. 1.5 Ghz CPU is just not fast enough for many new games today.
 
Mr. Stryker said:
That PC should be put out of its misery and the 423-pin should be disgraced. Wait until you ever get real cash for a whole new system. Otherwise a GeForce FX 5500/5700 or Radeon 9550/9600 would do.
Click to expand...

I agree, but I would add to your list a FX 5900nu and overclock it to 5900 ultra speeds.


http://www.pricewatch.com/prc.aspx?i=37&a=5587

A bit pricey compared to the 5500/5700 or 9550/9600 so it's up to you. The 256 bit memory bus is nice.
 
xdkimx said:
that pc looks way too outdated, putting a new gpu in there would explode the psu and would be too much for the cpu to handle, id sell the pc on ebay and save up at least $600 and build urself a decent gaming pc or $400 for a xbox 360

this might sound a little harsh, but investing new parts in that pc would be a waste of $
Click to expand...
He said that PSU can go to 350W max, he can get himself a 9800pro and it would not be too much hastle. I used to have an 9800pro on a athlon xp1700+
 
345 Watt is a peak value. It can't sustain it for hours when gaming. It's only a 250 Watt. You need to save as much as you can for a new PC. That machine is going to bottleneck just about anything you put in there. The GeForce FX 5500/5700 or Radeon 9550/9600 are good suggestions. Another option is to go with a used Geforce 4 4200 128MB on Ebay for less than $25. It's a 4 pipe card like the other ones but will cost less and would be more than enough power for that PC.
 
I think ASUS has a video card that c/w EXternal power supply, but it may be PCI E only. Check it out and see.
 
You can build a fairly modern setup for around 500-600 bucks dont even mess around with that system just a waste of money.
 
xdkimx said:
that pc looks way too outdated, putting a new gpu in there would explode the psu and would be too much for the cpu to handle, id sell the pc on ebay and save up at least $600 and build urself a decent gaming pc or $400 for a xbox 360

this might sound a little harsh, but investing new parts in that pc would be a waste of $
Click to expand...

xbox 360 is not 400 dollars don't be stupid, go check the price on eBay iz at least 550~800 extremely overpriced. it's out of stock everywhere.
 
^no shit :)

im assuming after the op saves up some $ the prices should go to retail, maybe less (mean no disrespect to the op)
 
Put an X850XT-PE in that Dell PC and it'll help the CPU work over 3GHz and the memory on the card would do the 3D work for you. Just kidding. ATI Rage XL is the way to go.
 
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