Radeon 3850 AGP, How bad will it bottleneck? HELP

Your CPU will bottleneck the card; but eitherway, the 3850 is the fastest AGP Card you can guy. If you do buy it though, you will be out of upgrade options for the computer.

I would recomend a complete new build--you coudl go cheap with a basic motherboard, an Intel E5200 (or 2180), a 9600GT Videocard and 2gb of ram. Could probably do it for around $300.

im so out of the loop with new computer ****, what kinda mobo would i be looking for if i was gonna do a new build? obv pcie, but could u give me an example of a cheapp pcie mobo that would be compatible with the intel E5200 and the 9600gt?

What video card do you own now?

a horrific radeon hd 2400 pro

E5200 $82.99
GIGABYTE GA-EP43-DS3L $79.99
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 $32.99 (19.99 after MIR)
HIS Hightech H483FN512P Radeon HD 4830 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 $109.99 (89.99 after MIR)
PC Power & Cooling Silencer PPCS500 500W $69.99 (49.99 with MIR)
$375.95 before rebates

I didn't notice you have a 500w psu so you might not need a new one. So if you keep you psu upgrading most of your computer will be aroung $200 more than getting a 3850 and you'll see a huge performance gain.

Start saving your money for a new system.

BUMP

You will see an improvement with just upgrading to a 3850 but not enough to justify buying one. You're money is much better spent by saving a couple hundred more dollars and uprading your whole system.

I have the exact same system, and made the upgrade to a PowerColor 3850. For WoW it made a huge difference outside of 25-man's, but our CPU is still the bottleneck in raids (with and w/o WWS recording). Worth the upgrade imo. Other games than WoW is uncomparable on the performance jump. UT3 all maxed out no problem. Fallout3 maxed runs great. BioShock maxed runs great. Left4Dead maxed runs great. Far Cry 2 is unplayable. Dead Space runs well. Grand Theft Auto IV runs horribly.

Consider a sound card to take some load off the cpu, I went w/ an X-Fi Xtreme gamer since it does its own sound processing.

Make sure you're in a WinXP environment for your games since our CPU is the bottleneck. Forego the DX10 experience (you won't get 10.1 because that requires more than one core).
Vista = bad gaming performance for our rig. (except for a title or two, like Devil May Cry 4)
XP 32-bit = gaming OS

Main reason Vista is bad for our CPU is because the audio stack was rewritten in vista and offloads a lot of audio processing to the CPU. Whereas in XP it still does it all on the sound card.

That is unless his old power supply only has a 20-pin power connection without an additional 4-pin cable. That mobo you recommended is 20+4-pin, while his current KV8 SE Deluxe is 20-pin.

they sell adapters.

Hmm... They now make 9400 GT for PCI. You might be able to pick one of those up for a little boost.

i really not think its worth the money. Your CPU will bottleneck.

You should save up money for new mobo cpu memory, after that replace gfx. Doesnt have to be all that expensive too