Global Conflict

Thanks for all the info guys. I ended up buying the Corsairs and they should ship by tomorrow.

I got the pair of 1GB 400's, and I'll put the ram I have right now in an old comp.

Now I wonder if I need a new vid card Right now I have a 128mb Radeon 9800 (not Pro). I'd like to get something better, but I can't afford to spend $600. Is there anything good that's under $200 or $300?

Thx again

Kaiserrr and me just ordered Powercolor X800 GTO Vivo AGP cards. They hopefully ship by tomorrow. It's said that these can be modded and overclocked to run on X800 XT or even X800 XT PE levels. Each cost 200 Euro which is a 100 Euros less than a regular X800XT costs. I guess the card will be fast enough and hell of a lot faster than the 9800 even without overclocking.

X800 XT PE

Whoa, that's my card, wonder how much I can overclock my x800 xt pe.

Forget Powercolor

You can have a Radeon X850 PRO for less than 300$, that would be a good card on ATI side.

If you go for Nvidia, you can have the Geforce 6800 or 6800 GS which should be in your price range.

P.S. : Be sure to buy the AGP Card, not PCI Express since you don't have PCI Express bus on your motherboard

Since you adrealy have a Radeon 9800, I don't think you should buy something below thoses card since you will not notice a great difference for what you will pay.

just one question inbetween,
will it be good to go PCI express if you alredy plan to update your comp (with new mobo, chip[amd 3...], grafics[ati 800or850] and add another gig of ram )

Yes of course... Next Gen Video Card like the Geforce 7800 and Radeon X1800 are not available on AGP, this port is going to disapear... And I think all the new mobo coming out are all PCI Express.

ok thx
time to change then

Cheesy, your DELL is aging, be careful of putting too much money into it. I can see a memory upgrade, but be careful of going further as the current chipsets and future chipsets only support PCIe. To use an AGP, you need to use a motherboard based on a previous generation chipset. Basically you'll be stuck buying last years or earlier motherboard.

If you're after a higher end video card, it may be best to tie it in with a new motherboard, CPU, and power supply.

And check your power supply wattage before buying a video card.

As for flashing a vid's BIOS to open up the pipes and make it a better video card, I've seen about a claimed 30% success rate on forums. Alot of artifacting results if the opened pipes are bad. You can flash back tho. Never done it myself and thats a big gamble in my opinion.

Yea ideally everything I get could be moved to my next system. I'm sure the RAM would be transferable, but it hadn't occured to me that AGP would cause problems there. Good to know.

I'd planned on keeping this comp for another year or two if it can take it, with upgrades to keep it going. Is that reasonable?

Yeah, depends of the Game you want to play... And dont expect to put the video setting higher than very low

Well I can play on it now at 1024x768 with about half of the stuff on medium and half on low. Would a better video card substantially improve my settings?

Oh yeah. But, if youre going to do that, might as well do the whole smash: video card, motherboard, processor, case and PSU. Dell cases are almost always 100% NOT compatable with standard motherboards, and if you toss in an upgraded motherboard and video card youll be needing the PSU to match.

The death of the AGP slot is not yet here. The PCI is 'supposed' to replace agp when the next windows release occurs. But that is actualy false, PCI will only give a big advantage to a system running 64 bit programs with a 64 bit operating system. Untill that happens AGP is the more stable and faster platform.

All the AMD 64 939 boards still ship with AGP. I do not see it as an issue for at least 3 years.

PCI does hve some good features now, from what I hear. Running dual 128mg nv6600s is supposed to kick ass.

BTW I just bought the ATI X850 Pro, $246 retail. It is awesome, I can play BF2 wide open. It actualy is more than my board can push but I am upgrading soon to the asus 939 amd 64. The 3500 with a kick ass Asus board is about $170 right now. As soon as it hits $150 I am on it.

I dont know about you guys, but I find a lot of the new card stuff to be hype as of yet. Remember the HL2 Release? "OMG IF YOU DONT HAVE A SUPER L337 COMPUTER WITH 2GB RAM AND 800 DOLLAR GRAPHICS YOU ARE LIKE TOTALLY PWNEDZ0rz3d!" Yeah well, I ran it on high with a Radeon 9600 Pro. I know have a Radeon 9800 Pro handmedown and I can play BF2 on Mostly high, some medium with 1200x1600. FEAR is at 1024x1280 or whatever that is with most on medium. Im pretty sure that card will last me until I cant get a handmedown something better.

@SpeedBump: what are your other specs?