[suggest on] is it worth it to upgrade my agp rig?

BaronVonSnakPak

i know the obvious answer is "no", but im thinking of doing it as "mercy upgrade" until i start making enough money to build a new dx10 worthy pc in a year or two, when vista and dx10 gfx cards are both a little more stable.

my current setup:

128 mb radeon 9700 pro
pentium 4 2.4 ghz cpu
1 GB ram
80 GB hd

im setting my budget at about $500. im also wondering if upgrading an agp rig with that budget will be able to run supreme commander, medieval total war 2, stalker, cnc 3, titan quest, and BF 2142? with the exception of stalker and cnc3 (because they havent come out yet), i can run the other games at either low, or low/medium settings with my old pos.

and as far as the upgrade goes, i have zero knowledge on the hardware side of things, so im going to need some help. suggestions for vid card, cpu, psu would be appreciated. hell, let me know if i need more ram aswell.

ToadTheMushroom

Grab a little more ram then consider overclocking a bunch of things. You could eek out that little extra performance through that rather than actually buying new components.

Upgrade to 2gig of decent ram and you will be fine for the DX10 era. OC your processor a little and your GPU if you can. Just a little, we're only talking say an extra 10% performance at most, but it would be worth it perhaps.

With only 500 dollars to spend, its probably better to save that and get an even better final machine, then upgrade something that will be obsolete in less than a year. An extra 500 is a lot, that could get you the ultimate top end GPU on its own.

That said, if you dont fancy overclocking, get a new graphics card. A cheap radeon x800 should be great and would easily run most things up to and including, say, FEAR or Company of Heroes on medium ish settings.

Your CPU is probably fine, as I said, overclocking is the cheapest way to upgrade. With a lot of fannage you would be surprised how much better they can get. I can get a load more performance out of mine with maybe £30 worth of cooling equipment. A good saving. Dont upgrade your CPU, because if you do to do any meaningful upgrade is gonna need a new motherboard then it spirals from there.

Hard Drives are uber cheap. I have like 2 80gig ones just lying around my flat, complete spares. Dont worry about that. You could also allocate some HDD space for a little extra memory, working a little like the RAM.

Really its up to you, if you really want an upgrade, go the whole hog in my opinion, save up for like a year and limp around on your old Pc, then splooge it all on an incredible DX10 beast that will future proof you for like 3-5 years after that.

Really, its gonna be a year before you 'need' DX10 anyways, I think Crysis will be the milestone that will make me upgrade my PC, as Im sure it will be for many others.

BaronVonSnakPak

last time i tried to overclock (the tiniest bit), the screen turned black and red, and then the tower shut down.

as for dx10, i dont mind waiting awhile before upgrading for it, because ive missed out on practically all the top titles that came out in 2006. thats essentially my mindset, upgrade relatively cheap, and be able to play last years better games, and a couple of this years, on higher settings if at all possible.

Falhurk

I'm not upgrading anytime soon. Take a look at what you do with your computer, evaluate if you really need to spend the cash and plan accordingly.

My box is this :

AMD Athlon 2500+
1 GB DDR PC3200 Ram
Sapphire Radeon 9600 Pro 256mb
250 GB IDE HDD

Not spectacular, but it works for WoW/HL2/Other games I play + Photoshop. Until there's something that it doesn't do that I NEED it to do, I'll not be upgrading it. Plus, my laptops a bit better.

Lord Jezo

I have an XP 2100+ and can't do a thing with it.

Would a new graphics card help or is my cpu so slow that I should just toss it? Right now I am running a Geforce 4 4400 and games look like poop, most things out now a days can hardly even run with their lowest settings. Some stuff, like Oblivion, wont even start, HD trailers from Apple.com won't play more than a few frames per second..

BaronVonSnakPak

im thinking this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814161071
a radeon x1950pro

another gig of ram, and a new psu. i figure with that, i ought to be able to run pretty much anything at a decent clip, right?