realistic GPU advice

vortmax

vortmax

New Member
I'm having a delema. I'm considering upgrading my current system but i'm having 2 trains of thought. I' like better 3d rendering ability to handle current games (like HL2) which I don't think my current g-card could take. It's a Gforce FX 5200.

My board is listed in my sig and supports AGP 8. I'm also running a athlon 2800+ Barton 333MHz FSB processor at 2.1 GHz. I'm sure my board and processor could support it, my Gcard is just lacking.

So realisticly what would be a good card to get. I don't want to get something that my board and processor won't be able to make full use of, altho I am planning on OCing the processor a tad.

My other thought is to overclock the current card. Is there enough potential to overclock this card? Cooling isn't a huge issue. With my full server tower, I have gobs of cooling potential

Guess I should ask this on the other forum, but i'll lump together.

Since my board supports the 400 mhz fsb athlon and I have the 333, can I overclock my chip to 400 like you do the Pentium 4's? I haven't dug around much with OCing the chip besides playing with memory timing.
 
I've had an FX 5200 and it didn't do a good job at overclocking. If you are planning on playing Half-Life 2, get an ATi card, the HL2 developers optimised the game for ATi cards. I won't recommend any exact cards because there are others in this forum with more expertise in that area but I recommend getting another stick of 512MB RAM for added performance.

Edit: Don't overclock the FSB of the 2800+ to 400mhz, it is pretty unstable and might crash. I OC'd my old 2800 Barton to a nice 192 mhz core (380 mhz FSB) which is 2.3 Ghz, with no problems. I haven't heard of many people getting to 400 FSB without problems.
 
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Keep considering upgrading. Overclocking that particuler GPU as already said wont get you far and besides a large step up to somthing like the 6600GT wont cost much.
 
Tough call here. Everything depends on your budget. I was in a relatively same boat about a month ago. To make a long story short, however I would have upgraded (vid card, processor, etc) I was being limited by having a socket A board. There just was not alot of potential for upgrade. So instead of spending 350-400 on upgrades, i spent 1k on the computer i have now thats in my sig.

PS....Blue, how do you like eVGA? I am very happy with their cust support and the overall quality of their cards.
 
PS....Blue, how do you like eVGA? I am very happy with their cust support and the overall quality of their cards.
Click to expand...

I have only bought one eVGA and that's the card I have now. I've been using this card for awhile now and have enjoyed it very much. I've had absolutely no problems with it and I've been able to get an overclock of 393MHz core and 1.08ghz mem using "Detect Optimal Frequencies" I do however run it stock settings and just overclocked to see the cards potential.
 
well i was under the impression that I could overclock the CPU enough to make it run current games well, especially if I upgraded to a stronger graphics card. Should I be looking at ATI or Nvidia? I've always been a Nvidia fan (actually a 3dFX fan before they died), but i'm pretty pleased with the performance of my ATI card on my laptop
 
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