Whats my bottleneck?

[TWC]

Whats slowing me down the most? My pci graphics card(radeon 32sdr. my 100 fsb system, or my cpu. If you would list your thoughts in the order you would upgrade and why I would greatly appreciate it.
soyo sy-71s2
316mb pc133 ram @ pc100
radeon 32mb sdr pci
quantam fireball 15gb 5400 rpm
philips seismic edge soundcard
labtec pulse 420 speakers (subwoofer)
HP 9501 cd-r
Celeron 633@952mhz 100fsb
The soyo is new so I have an AGP slot now, I was either going to get the radeon 8500 agp when its out or a PIII
1.13 ghz.



If you harbor my enemy, You are my enemy.

 

[arsend]

For one, the Soyo board will allow you to get that memory up to 133, even though your CPU will not go that fast. Just go to the BIOS and change the memory to +33 or something to that effect and you will see a slight increase in preformance. As to replacing the CPU or Video card, that would be a hard choice. More than likely, I would buy the CPU because it doesn't look like Pentium 3's will be going down much in price anymore. The Video card, on the other hand will go down in price and in 4-6 months from now, you could save hundreds of dollars. Before you buy that pentium III, make sure that it will work on your MB. You want the best of both worlds, buy a 800 MHZ Pentium, then buy the Radeon 8500 or 7500. This will cost you more, but will give you the best preformance for now.

If it works for you then don't fix it.

 

[TWC]

Thanks for the tremendous response fellas, I have a clear picture of which way to go now.

If you harbor my enemy, You are my enemy.

 

[Crashman]

The video card is your bottleneck. In fact you'd probably get better performance out of something as old as a TNT2 AGP card, simply because AGP 1x has 4x the bandwidth and AGP 2x has 8x the bandwith. AGP 4x supposedly has 16x the bandwidth of PCI, but most cards cannot take adavantage of all that bandwith, giving at most 2.5x the performance of AGP 1x.

Back to you Tom...