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  • Graphics Cards
  • Pentium
  • Celeron
  • Graphics
Last response: in Graphics & Displays
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February 17, 2002 2:11:39 PM

I have a 450mhz pentium 2/celeron (says "Celeron" at startup but "pentium 2"
in system properties), a 12mb voodoo 2 and 160mb ram (32+128).
What is my systems bottleneck in newer games based on quake 3?
If i upgrade the 3d card will it improve performance much? i have read alot
about the proccessor being the bottleneck with Voodoo2 systems, but do newer
3d cards like geforce 3/4 take more load off the cpu or just do the same as
the voodoo, but faster. If the 3d card is not the botleneck what should I do?
(without getting a new mother board + cpu)
Is my system at the limit of the PII motherboard (slot not socket so no
faster chips are available)
please help

scansfield

More about : question

a b U Graphics card
February 19, 2002 3:24:45 PM

A little information about the motherboard would be nice!

What's the frequency, Kenneth?
February 19, 2002 3:53:17 PM

the mother board is a Pentium 2 (slot) one with an agp slot (either 1x or 2x) and a couple of spare PCIs, USB, and the proccessor is a clereon (for sure now) 300a overclocked to 450 mhz. the main board is a soyo 6be if it helps.

scansfield
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February 19, 2002 4:04:47 PM

You seem to have a nice and balanced system. Unfortunately it also is quite dated - of course that if you buy a GF3 (or other modern card) you'll see a good performance increase (in games), but the rest of the system (not only the CPU) will be holding the GPU back.
But some new games won't run (slowly or not) in your system because of the lack of texture memory - minimum requirement 16MB. If you can't or don't want to spend a significant amount of money, you could upgrade to a value card like the GF2.
BTW - you most certainly have a celeron.

How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise
February 19, 2002 4:15:40 PM

thanks for that. thats just what i expected to hear. Hopefully I'll get a 32 meg Geforce 2 which will breath some life into my system. Although, i have found that in some games the performance isnt affected greately by the graphics settings (deus ex, q3 etc.) but when v sync is off the performance rockets in older games like Jedi knight. I once got a framerate of 800 fps (in the smallest screen size) WOW!

scansfield
February 19, 2002 4:19:30 PM

Yep. I ran a PII 300, for about 3.5 years. I found that just upgrading the graphics card and adding some RAM was a more cost effective project than splashing out on a whole new system.

Maybe in a year or two, you can 'up' the rest of the system.

:cool: <b><font color=blue>The Cisco Kid</font color=blue></b> :cool:
February 19, 2002 5:23:03 PM

with the system you have, I would think a oem Gf2mx or Ati Radeon 7000 would do nicely, you can found them around P easily! anything more expensive will be just a waste of money? and by the time you upgrade the rest of the system, that 399 Gf3/199 8500 will only cost about $99! :) 
!