Is an upgrade to X1950pro worth it? Or am I bottlenecked?

I had a similar rig... I had an AMD Athlon Mobile 2600+ (1.8 Ghz OC'd to 2.5 Ghz) with an ATI X800 pro. Everyone told me an upgrade to a 1950XT would be seriously bottlenecked. I decided to take the plunge anyway and buy the X1950XT AGP card. It was well worth it in my opinion. My 3dMark06 Scores went from 1948, to 4676. That's a pretty good gain. Games ran pretty well too.

Just my 2 cents...

not sure if it would be bottlenecked, but yes its a good upgrade from your current card

Well I ordered a random 400W cheap PSU (pulled from a new computer) which I won't know the brand until it arrives. Yea I know its prolly junk but I just needed a cheap replacement cause mine is dying. I'm not sure how to check the amps on it. Is it possible this PSU will work?

I doubt very much that it will run on a generic(cheap)400 watt supply the manufacturers recomend a 450 watt min but as i said the important bit is the Amps on the 12volt rail,you can check this by reading the sticker that will be on the PSU when you get it,it is possable that it will but you wont know until you get the PSU i know of people who are running 1950 pro's on 380 watt PSU's but thats the differance between a good psu and a bad one which = cash im afraid.
Mactronix

It'll run fine. The power supply will be fine. You'll be fine.

These people who think you must have 2kw psu's are people with a little knowledge, and you know where that leads.

As for the so-called bottleneck, how would you know? Your framerate will zoom with the 1950, and you can turn on eye-candy. You'll be playing the same games and enjoying them much more. So what if a faster proc would kick it up another couple f's-ps?

You will also see a big differance if you have gaming ram. High speed ram for gaming is almost if not more important than a good CPU. If you can afford it go to PCI-E they are much faster.

So I'd be looking at a possible PSU and GPU upgrade. PSU is about $50-60 for a quality one (some are cheaper w/MIR's) and about $150-170 for the x1950pro. That is about $200-225 for upgrade. You can get a budget x2 (much better than your current CPU), GPU, PSU, mobo, & DDR2 for about ($65 cpu, $130 GPU, $50 PSU, $60 DDR2) $300 or so. Now that would be a smarter choice, but that is about $100 more than the original option. So you can decide. BTW the DDR2 price was for 2 gig's of RAM, so you could save about $20-25 off of the price if you just got 1 gig, but that is starting to push things. 1 gig would be okay for now if you were running windows XP.

Well I won an auction on eBay and got a pretty sweet deal.

Ended up winning an EVGA 6800GS CO (copper heatsink, faster clocks) AGP card for only $35 plus shipping!

This card says it requires a 350w PSU so I should be in the clear

The PSU I ordered will arrive tomorrow. I am hoping for a good score, since the the brand is a surprise and guaranteed 400W or more!

My current PSU is an Enermax 300W with 15A running on the 12v rail.

I did the same thing basically

I had a P4 3.0E and a 6800 GT. When I upgraded to my x1950 PRO AGP their was no increase in FPS, but I was planning on upgrading CPU anyway. I slapped in an E6600 and the card blazes a large amount of games.

Any Source/HL2 game gets extremely high frames even on maxed out settings with lots of AA/AF.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817703011
26amps-one of the best brands- $75

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817139003
33amps-excellent price/performance-$65 (after rebate)

Just remember you get what you pay for. You know those amps will be there.

Well.....you might be able to, if you don't have alot hooked up to it. I originally found that a 6800gs requires 18a on the 12v rail. I have a link dating back to when the 6800gs came out, so you can see where it fits on the power consumption. I have a AMD 3200+ w/2gig's DDR, 2 DVD's, x1800xt running on a 13a PSU, so I'm sure it can work. I just wouldn't bank on any good results out of it. It might work now, but who knows what will happen in the future. I don't recommend using the PSU, so I'm just warning you if you do. It might be fine, but who knows. If the PSU fails at a later date, it might take out other parts, so just trying to inform you the best I can. There are several posts that people have used cheaper PSU's and come asking for help when there computer starts having problems. And then wonder why the PSU would cause issues. Okay I think I ranted long enough. Here is the link I was referring to. It's not all inclusive, but here it is.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/v [...] 006_6.html

Thanks for the advice

Lunyone - Yea I don't really have a lot hooked up. I have 2 HD, 2 DVD, and a floppy hooked up. Took out some PCI things I wasn't using. Hopefully it would be ok.

Scryer- Yea that makes sense and is what I was planning to do (build a new pc from scratch). I do that every few years but the economy is down right now and I'm hurtin a bit for cash. And also I seem to play the older games anyways so I should be ok.

I figure I can get another year or two out of my recent upgrades I bought

New cpu heatsink/fan - $10
3 new case fans - $7
450W random PSU - $10
6800 GS CO -$35

plus shipping, not a bad deal I dont think, to prolong my system.

ahh PSU my ass !

I have a generic 400W that doesnt even ouput half of that ( some cheap $20 chinese crap )

Athlon X2 5600+ / 2GB ram / X1950PRO ( just bought yesterday ) PCI-E / 1 HD / 1 DVD

It runs fine nothing is goind bad .. and i am running Crysis/UT3/COD4/Prostreet ( demos ) all maxxed out at 1024x768 except crysis ( shaders/shadow medium )

3Dmark 03 score : 18,230
3Dmark05 score : 9950
3Dmark06 score : 5230

CPU running fine as well and its oced to 3.0 ghz .

there's even a PSU requirment tool ( online tool ) that someone suggested in another thread and with my specs it suggested a 320W PSU ..

so plz stop spending money on useless stuff and buy out the important stuff !