Upgrade this way or that?

B

BeeIzebub

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 15, 2005
Messages
93
OK, I'm having a dilemma here. Right now my rig is a AMD Barton 3000 at 2350mhz with a gig of pc3200 Kingston Valueram. My board is a Nforce2 Asus A7n8x Deluxe. Nevermind about video card. What I plan to do with my computer is just one thing. GAME. I am going to be playing Battlefield 2 non stop amoung other pc games. I like to play at 1280 by 1024 with AA and AF up as high as I can. I have noticed that in benchmarks, when running at high rez's and putting up those options, the FPS you get is limited on your GPU. When running games like that, will upgrading my processor be worth it?

My question is should I A:Take advantage of the much cheaper AGP video cards from ATI (Example, a AGP x800xt costs $389 when a pci-e costs $500, and the x850XT for agp is $400 and the pci-e is $440). and keep the motherboard/cpu/ram I have now.

or B: Get a 3000 Venice, buy new gpu and cpu blocks, get new gig of ram, get a nforce4 ultra board, a pci-e card and a new psu? How much would you say the other new parts would affect my fps at really high resolutions(beyond 1280x1024). For example, Farcry at 1600x1200.

Right now with a 9700 non pro at 370/290 I can run HL2 at 1280x1024 with 6AA and 8AF nice and smooth.
 
well i went with option A ;)

but i do plan on going dual core amd 64 soon along with a g70 or r520 gpu. i find that i am limited by my cpu in most games (fps drops into the 20's just like it did on my 9800 pro) but i am able to crank the aa and af all the way up
 
You should go with option B for sure. Your barton is fine for quite some time. Just get the best video card you can afford and enjoy the smoothnes. An FX-55 with a 9700Pro is a much worse gameing system than a Athlon XP 3000+ with a X800XT and I dont think anyone would deny that.
 
grab an agp card and pump up the resolution..you wont tell the diff. between an XP and an fx-55 since it will be taxing the gpu soo much.
 
BeeIzebub said:
Right now with a 9700 non pro at 370/290 I can run HL2 at 1280x1024 with 6AA and 8AF nice and smooth.
Click to expand...

I call shens. I just benched with your settings with my 9700PRO @ 420/600 and the rest of my specs in sig and got a whopping 20fps. I wouldn't call that "smooth"
 
maybe he ran at those settings with those AA/AF on LOWEST SETTINGS LOL....dude...
 
that was probably the case, just rebenched with lowest possible settings but kept the AA and AF the same and got 50fps. but man the textures looked like something out of quake 2!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top