New graphics card: how much of a bottlneck is my CPU?

[Rayista Geoff]

In my perpetual quest to be no more than 5 years or so behind, it looks like I'm going to need a new video card. 8MB just isn't enough these days for all the way-cool games I haven't played yet like Freedom Force and Bridge Commander, not to mention Morrowind.

So here's my question for you kind people: should I do anything other than just buy the cheapest possible card, on the theory that I won't see any improvements with a more expensive card because of bottlenecks elsewhere in my system? Sadly, pitching the whole thing out the window and starting over is not an option.

I've got a Duron 1.1 GHz CPU with 384 MB RAM and an ABIT K7 mobo (4x AGP supposedly) running Windows 98SE. If I were going to go with NVidia, which I think I am, the bottom of the barrel choice seems to be a 64MB GeForce 4 MX. If I were to step up one level, I'd probably plump for a 128MB GeForce FX 5200 (non-Ultra obviously). There's about 15 dollars or so difference in price. Am I going to get anything for my 15 bucks, or should I just save it for a CD?

Thanks much, as ever!

Geoff

[gwallen4]

The MX440 and the FX5200 are just about equivalent in speed. However, the FX 5200 does a better job of rendering. See the reference below from Tom's Hardware. In rendering tests, some of the cards, including the MX440, were not even listed because they were incapable of or offered poor anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/index.html

[Orion]

from what I can tell, your processor probably won't be all that bad a bottleneck. It runs at a respectable speed, and while it isn't all that well endowed with cache, most modern games don't really lean heavily on the processor in the first place (especially games that will run on 384 meg of memory). if it really bugs you, you could upgrade processors-50 bucks for a decent upgrade to an athlon XP 2000+, 75 for a barton core Athlon XP 2500+ (and I know from experience the 2500 is a great proc-see my profile). The mobo you have should handle it (I looked it up and there are 2 Abit K7 mobos with 4X AGP-looks like the only difference is that one has onboard video, other does not. either way they both accept up to the athlon 2600).

Either way, to answer one of your questions, the processor shouldn't hold you back. Especially with games nowadays, the heavy load is usually on the graphics. The only other place you may find a problem with bottlenecks is your amount (or possibly type, I don't beleive you listed it) of memory.

I would recommend that you go ahead and purchase the top level graphics card you can currently afford that will work with your mobo, and just upgrade your processor, mobo, and/or memory later on. the reason I specify that you make sure your card will work with your mobo is that I can't remember offhand whether all 8X agp cards are backwards compatible with a 4x slot. I beleive they are, especially as you mentioned using a 5200, which is an 8x card, but I would rather admit lack of memory, than mislead you.

Have fun!
Orion

[Rayista Geoff]

Originally posted by Orion
if it really bugs you, you could upgrade processors-50 bucks for a decent upgrade to an athlon XP 2000+, 75 for a barton core Athlon XP 2500+ (and I know from experience the 2500 is a great proc-see my profile). The mobo you have should handle it (I looked it up and there are 2 Abit K7 mobos with 4X AGP-looks like the only difference is that one has onboard video, other does not. either way they both accept up to the athlon 2600).
Yeah, I noticed when you referred to it that I'd made a typo. The mobo I have is the KT7 (w/o RAID). I'm sure I'd have to see about upgrading the BIOS, since I'm pretty sure that the highest clock multiple I have at the moment is 12x.

Gwallen's point about the GeForce 4 cards not doing anisotropic filtering is also a good point.

Thanks much for the suggestions. I think I probably will go with something like the FX 5200.

[Orion]

Well, that certainly changes things. The highest cpu that Abit says that motherboard supports is the athlon 1.4 GHz. of course, you could get a higher end CPU and clock it down, but considering the cpu you have, I would personally suggest you save up for a new motherboard and memory before upgrading the CPU. again, in this setup, you are definately not going to run into the bottleneck at the processor level; the place you'll run into it will be on the memory level, with that SDRAM.

Odd, though, that ABIT says this about processor compatability:
" Processor
- AMD Socket A Duron (100MHz FSB) up to 950MHz
- AMD Socket A Athlon (100MHz FSB) up to 1.4GHz "
According to this, you are already using a proc that's more powerful than this handles...which would indicate to me that you're either overclocking, the computer is automatically underclocking, or that the ABIT site is wrong. of course, I'm also not recalling a 100 MHz FSB 1.4 GHz Athlon, but I may just be not recalling correctly. if there was a processor with those specs, then your highest multiplier would be at least 14, whether you can use the multiplier with what you ahve or not. (if you want explanation of that possibly cryptic statement, let me know.)

That information actually does change my recommendation, though. If you are going to stay with that motherboard for a while, then go for something not much more than the top level of your current motherboard; by the time you upgrade your motherboard, something more powerful will be far more affordable, hopefully. on the other hand, if you are planning on upgrading your motherboard and memory soon (say in the next few months) then it would make sense to buy the video card based on the next motherboard you plan on getting, and going for a more advanced card, like the Radeon 9600/9700/9800, or the Geforce FX 5600/5900.

Faced with a choice of any geforce 4 vs any geforce 5200, definately do some research on anandtech or tomshardware or whatnot, because some of the geforce FX series (noteably the 5200) had worse raw performance than some of the geforce 4 titanium series. It's for this reason that I don't personally recommend the 5200 to anybody. One review I read (I beleive it was in Maximum PC, pardon me for not remembering) stated that the 5200 had all the bells and whistles of DX9, but the only way to get decent framerates on games that take advantage of DX9 is to disable all those bells and whistles-therefore negating the advantage. When compared to the Geforce 4 MX series, however, I would definately say go for the 5200 instead. one model (I beleive the 420) used sdram, and the other just didn't have enough power to compete; they were the lowest of the low end offerings, to appeal to the casual home user, I would guess. better than your old 8 MB card, by a long shot, but for 15 dollars more, I would definately say bump up to the Geforce 5200.

I guess the short and concise answer would be this: figure out when/if you are going to upgrade the motherboard/memory. This will hold you back more than the processor. if soon, then buy a higher end vid card (as budget permits, matched to the future motherboard). if not soon, then but a low end one-the 5200 is a good deal, as are comparably priced radeon 9200 (I myself have a preferance for ATI). If going low end, then I would recommend the 5200 over geforce 4 MX anything, but not over certain Geforce 4 Titaniums. See the link by Gwallen for more research there, and also search AnandTech.

Orion

[Rayista Geoff]

Many thanks for your detailed thoughts, Orion!

Originally posted by Orion
Odd, though, that ABIT says this about processor compatability:
" Processor
- AMD Socket A Duron (100MHz FSB) up to 950MHz
- AMD Socket A Athlon (100MHz FSB) up to 1.4GHz "
According to this, you are already using a proc that's more powerful than this handles...which would indicate to me that you're either overclocking, the computer is automatically underclocking, or that the ABIT site is wrong.

Yeah, that is a little weird. My first thought was that that must have been the original info from when the board came out, i.e. those were the highest spec chips available at the time. But then that doesn't tally with what I remember about the user defined clock multiples that I've got available. (I checked 'em relatively recently because I was curious about precisely the processor upgrade question.) That makes it sound like that info's from the last BIOS upgrade (which was like a couple of years ago).

To be honest, I'm not really sure about the overclocking/underclocking issue. The Duron 1.1 GHz was itself an upgrade and all I did was change the clock multiple in the BIOS to 11x and it seemed to work fine. But since I was upgrading from a Duron 600 I probably wouldn't have noticed any covert underclocking.


Faced with a choice of any geforce 4 vs any geforce 5200, definately do some research on anandtech or tomshardware or whatnot, because some of the geforce FX series (noteably the 5200) had worse raw performance than some of the geforce 4 titanium series. It's for this reason that I don't personally recommend the 5200 to anybody.

The "titanium" ones are the GeForce 4 Ti models, right? Yeah, they're definitely miles better than either the GeForce 4 MX or the FX 5200 according to that article in Tom's that gwallen4 mentioned, and when I saw the article I thought "yeah, that's the card I want", but I'm having problems finding a source for 'em over here in the UK. I haven't found anybody who has them on their site who actually has them in stock. It seems like they've been discontinued. Didn't see anything when I checked on EBay either. Shame about that really, since the couple of e-tailers that do at least have a listing for them show them to be just a fraction more than the FX 5200s.