Hi there,
Looking to breathe a teency bit of life back into my aging desktop gaming station and squeeze another year or so out of it. Just started running Age of Conan and the performance sucks rocks on my current rig:
■i865PE chipset
■P4 Northwood 3.2GHz HT CPU
■2gb DDR400 dual-channel RAM
■nVidia 6800GS AGP video
I know that my CPU is going to be a bottleneck even with the graphics updated, and I can't put a new dual-core chip on my board as the chipset doesn't support it. This upgrade is just as I said to stave off a full mobo/cpu/ram/video upgrade for awhile (about a year).
I'm wondering if I should get the Radeon HD3850 AGP card for $218CAD or the Radeon HD2600XT AGP for $134CAD...
Will my system not be able to realize the full potential of the HD3850 due to my CPU and is it thus better to get the HD2600XT? Or will I actually get a dramatic increase in performance out of the HD3850? I have no problem spending the money on the HD3850 if it's going to be head and shoulders better than the HD2600XT, but at this point in time a full mobo/cpu/ram/vid swap is out of reach so I'm not going to be spending more than just one of the two cards listed.
Looking to breathe a teency bit of life back into my aging desktop gaming station and squeeze another year or so out of it. Just started running Age of Conan and the performance sucks rocks on my current rig:
■i865PE chipset
■P4 Northwood 3.2GHz HT CPU
■2gb DDR400 dual-channel RAM
■nVidia 6800GS AGP video
I know that my CPU is going to be a bottleneck even with the graphics updated, and I can't put a new dual-core chip on my board as the chipset doesn't support it. This upgrade is just as I said to stave off a full mobo/cpu/ram/video upgrade for awhile (about a year).
I'm wondering if I should get the Radeon HD3850 AGP card for $218CAD or the Radeon HD2600XT AGP for $134CAD...
Will my system not be able to realize the full potential of the HD3850 due to my CPU and is it thus better to get the HD2600XT? Or will I actually get a dramatic increase in performance out of the HD3850? I have no problem spending the money on the HD3850 if it's going to be head and shoulders better than the HD2600XT, but at this point in time a full mobo/cpu/ram/vid swap is out of reach so I'm not going to be spending more than just one of the two cards listed.