Help Me Keep This Old RIG!!!

help me choose a new AGP card. max $200 tho id rather not go that high. the choices look to be a 7600gt 256mb, 7800gs 256mb, 1950 256mb or 1950 512mb

my rig is a p4 3.2 ghz 2gb ram, 500w psu (double checking on that) and the vid card is a 9800pro 128mb

would i get a sizable advantage with one of those newer cards over the 9800? would my cpu hold them back? games (online only) played are test drive unltd, bf2/2142, ut2004. i dont care about AA/AF, super high resol, mark, bragging rights. i just want 1024x768 with good fps around 50

i know most of u will say just get a new pcie mb/vid card but i have a dell xps and that stuff isnt easily upgradable. i do plan on building a new system but not for a while. money isnt an issue, so i dont care if i drop $200 now and build a new $1500 system in 6 months

thx

Go with either of the X1950s. The 7800 is getting a little old (comparatively) and both the 7800 and 7600 will get trashed by the 1950s.

This site did a comparison and used a system that is probably similar to yours. It was more a comparison between AGP and PCI-e, but it still works:
7800GS and X1950.

I agree that he would see huge gains from a 7600GT, but for $150 (in AGP they come nowhere near $105) they're a terrible buy when you can get that X1950GT I linked for the same price.

I don't think it will bottleneck a 3.2 pentium. You may want to OC it a little though.

CPUs tend to become the bottleneck at lower resolutions like under 1280x1024. Above that, the GPU is required to do most of the work. If you are at or above that res, you shouldn't have a problem.

What is the price difference between the 512 and 256?

7600GT and 7800GS are supposed to be similar in performance, so either of them is good, but an x1950Pro/GT is the best

I would stick with 256 version, 512 isn't worth the extra cash unless you really need a few extra frames in high resolution graphics. When I say a few frames I'm serious, like 2 - 5 more.

cant OC dells tho i dont think id wanna on such an old system


You can overclock a dell, just not too high.


If you thought about it, look into a new CPU cooler first. Those Prescott's love to heat up.

Personally, I'm not sure how. Back in the time when my knowing of computers was very small, our dell contracted a trojan(guess who did it ) And we had a friend of ours fix it, and used some sort of utility to overclock the processor(kinda asked him too myself). Wasn't a noticeable overclock either. 2.8 -> 3.0 I can find out what it is if my folks see the guy anytime soon.

But yeah, you can't access the BIOS normally, but with a program this guy used, he apparently did.

well my psu is a 460w so i just squeak by and dell confirmed it would work in my system....until i told them i had 3 hard drives i could get by on 2 but not just 1. hmmpff