Should I upgrade my processor or vid card?

[Moiee]

I can only afford one or the other. But upgrading the processor will be a lot of hassle and more expensive caus eI need to get a new mobo with it. I have a 400mhz prcoessor at the moment and wanted to get about 1ghz. The video card I have is a voodoo 3 3000 and wanted to change it to a Geforce 3. Which out of the two things I want to upgrade would have the most impact for games? I want to play games like Dungeon Seige, Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, Soldier of Fortune II. These games work terribly currently with choppy framerate or don't run at all. If I upgrade my processor I'd still be stuck with the crappy vid card. But if I upgrade my vid card from voodoo 3 to Geforce 3, wouldnt that have a BIG improvement on the performance of the game? even though my processor will remain at 400mhz (with 256mb ram).

 

[dweilbacher]

First:
The minimum requirements for some of those games is about 400Mhz processor and
128MB of RAM. The Voodoo3 3000 is a nice card. I would think that what you
have now should run the games (you may have to turn down some of the lighting
effects).

If not, then you may need to look at other things.

Check your drivers on the Voodoo card. There are a lot of good drivers out
there that can up the Frame rate of these cards(www.voodoofiles.com). These
cards overclock well too.

Upgrade choice: Video Card first. Then MB/CPU.

Also, have you tried to overclock the CPU(you did not say if it is a
Celeron or Pent II), but you can try to up the FSB to boost performance
of the CPU. Most PII 400 will run at 450(112 FSB) and 500(124 FSB).

Abit KX7-333R, Abit Siluro Ti4400, XP1800+, 512MB Crucial DDR2100, WD 120 GB HD, Santa Cruz.

 

[bront]

Don't bother getting a GF3. Go for either a GF4 TI4200, or an ATI 8500.

The video card will help you a bit, but it will not do too much.

How much money are you looking to spend? That might make your choices easier. If you've got over 300, You should probably look for a CPU/MB upgrade. If you're talking less than 200, you're looking at one of the afore mentioned video cards as a better value.

As a short term investment, upgrading the memory might help. PC133 is cheep, and should work in that system. I was able to run W2K Advanced Server on a P2 300 on an Asus P2B with 384MB of Ram at PC100 speeds quite nicely. Now, I wouldn't have been able to do too much on it game wise (Had a Riva TNT), but it ran smoothly and had very little slow down due to disk access.

To run current games in acceptable framerates, you should run them at lower resolution. Try 800x600 and see how fast it runs, adjust other settings as nessessary.

It can be said that smoking is one of the leading cause of statistics.

 

[Moiee]

I tried running those games with my current card, and they either won't work because my card is unsupported now or run very badly. I have a P2 400 with 256mb ram using XP. I just want to be able to play these games at at least 30fps
I don't want to overclock, not into that kind of thing.