effect of cpu speed on 3d card

[Guest]

I've got an old 500Mhz athlon and am thinking about getting a new GeForce board to speed up 3d (existing card too slow). I read the recent review about the effect of cpu speed with geforce mx, gts and gts pro boards, but the benchmarks only showed down to 800Mhz athlons - would a 500Mhz version be a limiting factor? Also, how do geforces compare to Ati Radeon boards? Can you get geforce boards with integrated video capture/video out like an all in wonder?

Thanks for any thoughts.

 

[machow]

I don't think a 500Mhz Athlon would be much a problem. I think you could go for it, and MX perhaps. You could do prettymuch anything with 500MHz I think.

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This site is cool.

 

[nicewar]

For the specs on the geforce cards go here http://www.nvidia.com/Products.nsf

"Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it."

 

[HolyGrenade]

Both the GeForce and the Radeon cards are based on T&L GPUs. This means any game that supports T&L (i.e. most games that support DX7 and above and almost all games comming out now) will use the Graphics card for virtually processing all the graphics. The CPU however, will still be used while calculating the Physics etc. in the game.

This means that, with one of those cards your computer will comfortably run all current games plus the ones in the near future at an aduquate resolution and colour depth.

Unless, you really want super framerates at extremely high resolutions, your system is more than enough.


<i><b><font color=red>"2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2"</font color=red></b></i>

 

[Guest]

Cool! does anybody recommend MX/GTS/Ultra geforce cards on a price/perf basis? anybody seen benchmarks comparing geforce2 and radeons?

 

[ejsmith2]

You can overclock any of the G2 cards quite a bit, if you put some good case cooling on them. Go with whatever your budget allows, and pick up a new GPU heatsink/fan and same ram fins. I think most of the Ultra come with ram fins, but use some really nasty epoxy for the adhesive. Plan on getting some arctic silver and superglue, or AS adhesive.

 

[HolyGrenade]

Dont use superglue, use some sort of thermal epoxy.


<i><b><font color=red>"2 is not equal to 3, not even for large values of 2"</font color=red></b></i>

 

[nicewar]

I'm still using the toothpaste and hair-gel.

"Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it."

 

[ejsmith2]

You don't use the superglue between the cpu/ram and the heatsink =) You use it on one or two edges;just a drop does the trick.