Bottleneck? : Pentium 4 and a ATi HD4650.

[Moved from CPUs & Components Forum]

Hello,

Standford University has had this Folding@Home project for quite some time now, and I figured it was time to help out. The problem is, I am super limited budget wise. I mean really limited.

Heres how it is:

The 24/7 F@H computer will be a IBM ThinkCentre. It has a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 HT processor. I plan on adding 1GB of RAM to it, totalling 1.5GB DDR1 RAM.

My question of concern is with the video card. I would like to purchase a PCIe ATi Radeon HD4650 card as it is cheap and provides decent performance. However, the 4 series Radeon cards are fairly new and the P4 is fairly old. It is hyper-threaded and on a LGA775 socket, but....are we going to see performance decrease in the graphics department.

Thanks. I am trying to determine whether buying the card would be a waste, although I could use it future systems. Comments/Answers greatly appreciated.

Ok, thank you very much. I suppose we will be seeing performance close to the 3xxx series cards. I have no problem with this. I plan not to use this PC for any use other than folding at the moment. Of course, it would probably be fine as a PC anyway. I am not so certain about have DDR1 memory in it though, as far as futureproofing it. Seeing we are on DDR3 now...otherwise, I seem confident with this choice.

Thanks.