New card bought - Bottlenecking questions.

[Silvergun X]

My budget is around, or just over ?100. I'm not after an immensely powerful card, but what would be the most powerful AGP card I could buy for this money?

I'm seeing 256mb cards which are around ?50, but 128mb cards that are around ?90. So I don't know if a 128 would be faster than a 256...

Aaaaaghhhhhh...

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My current card is an ATI Radeon 9200se and it's just crap, now... Looking for a few steps up.

[Digfox]

Depends on the ?100 budget. If it's strict, the Nvidia 6800LE is regarded as a better card depending on speeds (- 8 Pixel Pipelines, - 300MHz Core GPU clock speed, - 700MHz DDR memory clock speed). If you can go to ?130 the 6800NU will have the 12 Pixel pipelines and faster core. Both of these are 128MB cards, as 256MB does not always equal better.

Both are good overclockers and should give a nice boost compared to the 9200SE.

[Silvergun X]

Excellent, thank you for that.

[tonyk100]

Is it possible to get a card around ?60 thats not to shabby, currently got a geforce4 Ti4200, which let me play Far Cry and Halflife 2, OK. I'm normally running the monitor at 1024, so I don't need super high res support but I am interested in maybe replaying the games with the details set higher.

Any computer fair recommendations. the consoles are where I play most but i'm looking for a affordable (missus friendly) update?

[Digfox]

Goning to be difficult but a ATI 9800 Pro or 9700 Pro would give a reasonable boost, if you can five them for that money. Online the 9800 Pro goes for around ?80.

[Ajay1986]

Also worth a look would be this 6600GT at ?104.99

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=94362

[forpey]

I'd go for the 6600GT. ^ ^

Its the best mid-range AGP card out there (closely followed by 9800pro). Next step up are the X800 / 6800 range, which are out of reach at ?100.

[Silvergun X]

My new card came today.

I bought an Asus V9999TD, Geforce 6800 for ?135 (That's including P&P). I was going to go for a few of the cards recommended here, but a friend of mine got this very same card and said that it was quite a different from a Radeon 9800 Pro that he had, so I caved in and got one of my own.

However, i've now encountered a new problem. Bottlenecking! Woo!

I was told that my processor will be bottlenecking my graphics card - I thought a P4 2.8ghz was quite a decent processor to have. Will upgrading this to a 3.0ghz+ make that much of a difference in performance?

Same question goes for upgrading from 512mb ram to 1gb. The performance increase is astounding compared to my 9200se, but I still get pauses in-game (Quake 4 on Medium detail, which as far as i'm aware was made for 128mb cards. Low detail on 1024x768 and I get no jumping at all). Framerate is fine.

[Digfox]

So you went for the 6800NU in the end :-)

I am guessing you have a P4 Socket 478 Northwood or Prescott core? If so which Intel Chipset is it plugged into? If its the i875P platform and you are using a DDR400 then doubling up the RAM from 512 to 1GB will probably give you the biggest and cheapest jump in performance. If you already have one 512MB stick another can be had for ?30ish (PC3200 DDR400Mhz) which would be cheap enough.

Given that a P4 3.0 Mhz Prescott is ?120ish (3.2Mhz ?170 ish) I personally wouldn't look at upgrading the CPU + Memory if you're on an older intel platform/chipset. If you start looking at CPU + RAM then I'd consider buying a AMD64 + Mobo + RAM (selling your intel stuff to recoup). The cost difference marginal and some performance charts are here, scroll down to DX9 Farcry 1280x1024 test results:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/cpu_charts-15.html#directx_9

Hope that helps.

[mid]

Is it possible to get a card around ?60 thats not to shabby, currently got a geforce4 Ti4200

I upgraded my GeForce Ti4200 to a 128Mb ATI 9550 for about ?50, and they're cheaper than that some places. ****e card (a touch slower than the GeForce even) at spec speeds, but it clocks like a bastard as long as you get the softmod-patched drivers, even without extra cooling (just make sure you get one that does have a fan on it).

I'm now happily playing Battlefield 2 on medium detail at 1024x768. If you're doing things on a real budget, then it's not a bad idea. Even clocked from 250MHz core to 400MHz (though I could go a little bit faster) it's only equivalent of a 9600 Pro, however, so you're not going to get 6800 performance.