CPU or GPU upgrade?

[Nadeem]

Hi all
I am an occasional gamer and my machine has an Athlon XP 2400+ and an ATI
Radeon 9700 Pro with 768 MB RAM (DDR266).

I want to upgrade the graphics card to be able to play newer games but I am
afraid whether changing the graphics card will change my framerate with 3D
games because of the ageing CPU. Furthermore, I my AGP slot is only 4X so I
am a bit concerned whether the new card will run at maximum performance.

I would appreciate any input.

Thanks.
Nadeem.

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Hi all
I am an occasional gamer and my machine has an Athlon XP 2400+ and an ATI
Radeon 9700 Pro with 768 MB RAM (DDR266).

I want to upgrade the graphics card to be able to play newer games but I am
afraid whether changing the graphics card will change my framerate with 3D
games because of the ageing CPU. Furthermore, I my AGP slot is only 4X so I
am a bit concerned whether the new card will run at maximum performance.

I would appreciate any input.

I'm afraid you're stuck where you are, you will have to change both of
them or neither. If you want to change to a modern graphics card, very
few except some mid-range cards are still available in AGP format. Most
of the top-end cards are now PCI-Express rather than AGP. There are
still some mid- to low-end cards which still come in AGP, such as ATI
X1650-series, or the Nvidia 7600-series. I don't think either of those
are much upgrades from your existing ATI 9700-series, except for some
additional hardware shader support. If you're going to be playing games
that you're already playing that already work with your 9700-series,
then they are not likely going to need support for these additional
shader hardware.

But going upto PCIe will automatically mean a new motherboard is needed.
And there are no PCIe-supporting Athlon XP chipsets or motherboards. So
that will automatically mean you'll need to upgrade to Athlon 64 X2 or
Core 2 Duo.

Yousuf Khan

 

[nobody]

I'm afraid you're stuck where you are, you will have to change both of
them or neither. If you want to change to a modern graphics card, very
few except some mid-range cards are still available in AGP format. Most
of the top-end cards are now PCI-Express rather than AGP. There are
still some mid- to low-end cards which still come in AGP, such as ATI
X1650-series, or the Nvidia 7600-series. I don't think either of those
are much upgrades from your existing ATI 9700-series, except for some
additional hardware shader support. If you're going to be playing games
that you're already playing that already work with your 9700-series,
then they are not likely going to need support for these additional
shader hardware.

But going upto PCIe will automatically mean a new motherboard is needed.
And there are no PCIe-supporting Athlon XP chipsets or motherboards. So
that will automatically mean you'll need to upgrade to Athlon 64 X2 or
Core 2 Duo.

Yousuf Khan

Add to that: new RAM - DDR2, new power supply - the old one is most
likely insufficient for today's power requirements. Most likely new
HDD - Intel doesn't support more than 1 PATA channel, and you don't
want HDD to share it with CD/DVD, and even if you go AMD your old
drive is just slow and small at today's standard. All in all, you'll
be better off with a complete new box.

NNN

 

[Nadeem]

I'm afraid you're stuck where you are, you will have to change both of
them or neither. If you want to change to a modern graphics card, very
few except some mid-range cards are still available in AGP format. Most
of the top-end cards are now PCI-Express rather than AGP. There are
still some mid- to low-end cards which still come in AGP, such as ATI
X1650-series, or the Nvidia 7600-series. I don't think either of those
are much upgrades from your existing ATI 9700-series, except for some
additional hardware shader support. If you're going to be playing games
that you're already playing that already work with your 9700-series,
then they are not likely going to need support for these additional
shader hardware.

But going upto PCIe will automatically mean a new motherboard is needed.
And there are no PCIe-supporting Athlon XP chipsets or motherboards. So
that will automatically mean you'll need to upgrade to Athlon 64 X2 or
Core 2 Duo.

Yousuf Khan

Oh if an upgrade is going to cost me that much just to play games, I think
its better I buy an XBox360 or wait for a PS3...

I bought a copy of Splinter Cell Double Agent but it doesnt play on my ATI
9700 because it requires pixel shader 3.0.... that really sucks. Last time
I upgraded to this graphics card because My GeForceMX440 wouldnt play
Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow. I am beginning to think Ubisoft owns my PC
more than I do...

Thanks for your comment.

Nadeem.

 

[YKhan]

I bought a copy of Splinter Cell Double Agent but it doesnt play on my ATI
9700 because it requires pixel shader 3.0.... that really sucks. Last time
I upgraded to this graphics card because My GeForceMX440 wouldnt play
Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow. I am beginning to think Ubisoft owns my PC
more than I do...

Well, as I said those mid-range video cards will serve your purpose and
they have SM3.0 support, and will have AGP versions. They just won't be
all that much better in existing games than your 9700. But it will have
the additional Shader Model extensions that you're looking at. So
you'll be able to play the new game.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Tony Hill]

Hi all
I am an occasional gamer and my machine has an Athlon XP 2400+ and an ATI
Radeon 9700 Pro with 768 MB RAM (DDR266).

I want to upgrade the graphics card to be able to play newer games but I am
afraid whether changing the graphics card will change my framerate with 3D
games because of the ageing CPU. Furthermore, I my AGP slot is only 4X so I
am a bit concerned whether the new card will run at maximum performance.

I would appreciate any input.

You're unfortunately running into a situation where you probably need
to do a fairly major upgrade to get an appeciable performance
increase. Unfortunately there aren't many worthwhile upgrades of JUST
a CPU (best you could possibly hope for is an AthlonXP 3200+, and
there's a reasonable chance that won't work with your motherboard).
Probably the best bet here would be to check your motherboard specs,
figure out what the fastest supported chip is and then look for one
second-hand.

For JUST a video card you have a few more options, though not a lot.
Pretty much all new video cards and motherboards use PCI-Express for
their video interface, AGP has been mostly obsoleted. However if you
really want to stretch the life of the PC for games a bit you could go
for something like an AGP GeForce 7600GS card. These can be found for
about $120-$130. There are a few higher-end cards, but they probably
wouldn't make much sense with your current CPU, not to mention the
fact that they cost more.

Neither upgrade is likely to make your system cutting-edge by any
stretch. At best it'll be stretching the life of it a bit further,
and neither component is going to be one that you could later move to
a new system. Long story short, probably your best bet is to save up
until you can afford to pretty much buy a whole new system.

 

[Doug]

I recently upgraded from a mobile athlon XP (running at 2600Mhz) to a Asrock
775Dual-VSTA motherboard. This motherboard is cheap ($60 USD) and supports
both PCIe (only 4 lanes though) and AGP 8x. It also supports DDR and DDR2. I
was able to re-use my RAM (DDR400), vid-card (AGP 850xt) and 20-pin PSU. All
I had to do was buy the P4 945+ and the motherboard. My memory benchmarks
more than doubled as did my Sisoft arithmetic scores (after overclocking the
945+ to 3.94 Ghz). This would probably be your cheapest upgrade option.
Asrock also makes a similar board (but w/full 16 lane PCIe) for AMD athlon
64.