Hey everyone. I've seen other questions similiar to this, but not exactly what I'm looking for. I have a pretty dated machine by today's standards and I'm looking to prolonged the life a little more. Now I know there is always the question of save the money to buy a new machine instead of upgrade, but that is not necessarily the issue here. Here's my current setup:
Intel D865PERL motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz with/HT
XFX 7600 GT 256MB DDR3 AGP 8x video card
2 GIGs or PC3200 Dual channel RAM
Creative Labs Audigy soundcard
What I find is that I can play most games pretty well, but some of the newer stuff, especially anything using the Unreal engine just kills my system. COD4, COD:WaW, BF2142... those all play pretty well so no complaints with those. I've read about the CPU bottlenecking the video card and I've read as much as I can find, however, what I haven't found is what exactly the bottleneck is. Is it the bus speed, processor speed, AGP speed, etc? What I am looking to do is upgrade the video card to a Sapphire Radeon 3850HD 512MB AGP card. If the card will be limited, are there any options outside of upgrading to a PCI-e motherboard with a dual core processor? I can get the video card for just under $100.
Thoughts? Oh, and thanks in advance.
-Hawkes
Intel D865PERL motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz with/HT
XFX 7600 GT 256MB DDR3 AGP 8x video card
2 GIGs or PC3200 Dual channel RAM
Creative Labs Audigy soundcard
What I find is that I can play most games pretty well, but some of the newer stuff, especially anything using the Unreal engine just kills my system. COD4, COD:WaW, BF2142... those all play pretty well so no complaints with those. I've read about the CPU bottlenecking the video card and I've read as much as I can find, however, what I haven't found is what exactly the bottleneck is. Is it the bus speed, processor speed, AGP speed, etc? What I am looking to do is upgrade the video card to a Sapphire Radeon 3850HD 512MB AGP card. If the card will be limited, are there any options outside of upgrading to a PCI-e motherboard with a dual core processor? I can get the video card for just under $100.
Thoughts? Oh, and thanks in advance.
-Hawkes