What Vid Card to get for slightly dated comp

[Cynic662000]

To start, I currently have a Asus A7V, Duron 650, 384 mb ram and a Asus GeForce 256.
I've been busting my balls lately over what vid card to throw in my comp. I've been looking at ATI's Raedon 8500 64 or 128, and the Geforce4 Ti line of cards. The Ti4600 is a little out of my price range, so maybe the 4400. But, what brand? I've been looking at what people are saying, and mainly VisionTek, LedTek, and GainWard seem to stand out. Any reccomendations?
Next, How well will my comp run with one of these cards in it anyway? I was planning on getting a good card now, riding out my comp for a while longer, getting a new comp, and just swapping my new card over.
2 problems with that plan tho, will a card of that level even work in my current system well, and when new comp time rolls around, they're will be new cards around that I'll want, and cost about as much as I would pay for one now.
So, I'm stumped, I need a lot of input as to what I should do. My friends are pissed at me cuz I keep bugging them about it, *l*
Anyway, plz post what you think a good course of action would be.

 

[Aexoth]

Regardless of what videocard you get, your duron 650 is going to be your bottleneck, if you want faster preformance, you should buy a good HSF with your new videocard, and clock your duron at 850/900,

and if your not a fan of drawing the l1 bridges closed, just thet your bus at 133, your asus will change the multiplier for the PCI clock to your system will not run your PCI clock at 44mhz, it will change the AGP, DMA, USB, IDE clock multiplier as well. And as long as you have 133mhz memory, everthing should be fine.

The ati radeon 8500LE 64meg, goes for about $100, combined with a good HSF, about $140-160 total, and you should definatly notice a pretty big difference.

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[Cynic662000]

I'm not much of a clocker, it scares me
I was kinda thinking grab a duron 1ghz and hs/f for $100 or so. I don't have a clue how to do what you just said anyway.
The Ti440 is really attractive, but my comp's a little too slow for that right now maybe?
Possibly when I get a new comp I'll go for something like that.
Anyway, thanx for the input, keep 'em coming! What do the rest of you think?

 

[Pwent]

Personally, I'd go with a Duron 1.0(or more)~$50 or so
GF3 Ti200/8500LE retail is lower than ______ on the street. Ti200(128 MB for $10-20 more is worth it) will be fine with the Duron, as will a 8500LE 64 MB. THe Radeon offers DX 8.x support though...

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[chuck232]

Unless you intend to either overclock or upgrade your processor, there really wouldn't be too much point in upgrading your comp. A Ti4200 scales CPUs very well so at lower speeds there really isn't much differnce between it and lower priced video cards. Only at XP1600+ does the Ti4200 really pull away. So if you don't think you're gonna upgrade for a while, I'd get a Duron 1GHz maybe a bit more and get a ATi R8500LE 128MB RETAIL!!! Make sure it is retail. The retail ATi cards come with 3.3ns RAM which is way above the needed for 250MHZ RAM. I'm not sure if the 64MB version has the 3.3ns RAM. That would come out to about $225-$250 and would last you probably till the end of this year.

My firewall tastes like burning.

 

[Cynic662000]

I'd sure like to play Doom3 when it's out, definatly not going to happen with my curremt comp.
If I threw a 1ghz duron in my comp, you would reccomend a 128 Raedon rather than 64? And what's LE mean?
With one of those and my current system, would I be running Doom3, or not even close?
Maybe I'll do a major upgrade around then anyway.

-something clever and/or funny-

 

[chuck232]

I kinda doubt you'll be able to play DoomIII well even with the upgrades. I'm guessing that you'll need at least a R8500 with a AXP2000+ or a P4 2.2GHz or so to play it pretty well. I'd probably recommend either the R8500 64MB RETAIL or the R8500LE 128MB. The LE is the R8500 except clocked lower (250/250 instead of 275/275). The 128MB actually rivals the 64MB R8500 in some games. The 128MB R8500LE RETAIL has the 3.3ns RAM which overclock very well.

My firewall tastes like burning.