Upgrade to Ati HD3850

[zrunelord]

I would like to upgrade my old system - AthlonXP 2600+,Ecs KT600 mb,470w psu,1gb Samsung ddr400,Nvidia gs5900 agp,2 drives 1 ide the other sata.Would it be worth my while to upgrade to 2 gigs ram,Ati Radeon HD3850 & 600w psu ? Or would the old cpu be a bottleneck & the upgrade would be for nought?

Thnks
Zrunelord

 

[aevm]

I think your old PSU is good enough for the HD 3850.

You would see a major improvement in games. Some games that refuse to install on the old card will work well on the new one.

That being said, you're better off IMO waiting until you can afford a new CPU/MB/DDR2/HD 4850. Something like US$ 400 or 500 would be enough, I think.

 

[fatcat]

I am not expert on GPU but I wonder if the 2600 will be able to use all the power of a HD 3850......

 

[zrunelord]

I think your old PSU is good enough for the HD 3850.

You would see a major improvement in games. Some games that refuse to install on the old card will work well on the new one.

That being said, you're better off IMO waiting until you can afford a new CPU/MB/DDR2/HD 4850. Something like US$ 400 or 500 would be enough, I think.

Thnks for the promt reply,
Unfortunately I cannot buy a new system at the moment,perhaps then I would be better off with an Ati HD3650 ,a recom 450w Psu & 1gb more ram ..
Thnks
Zrunelord

 

[aevm]

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. The HD 3850 costs 3 times more and would probably not work at its best in that PC. I'm guessing it would still do better than the HD 3650, but not enough of a difference to justify an extra $80.

 

[Helloworld_98]

You will probably have bottlenecks though, so it would make more sense to get a 3650, since from what I've read you'll need to have a dual-core 939 socket CPU before it doesn't bottleneck.