Upgrade RAM or buy 3D Accelerator??

[jb123]

Firstly, I have an Intel P2 (BX 512K 440 Chipset) 300MHz Celeron PC, with 64MB PC100 SDRAM, 4MB AGP 3D Video Card, and 6.4GB UDMA IDE hard drive. I have had this set-up for about 2 years now. Mainly bought for microsoft office stuff and the occasional game (age of empires/championship manager/the sims).

The thing is that I recently bought a flight sim game called "Fly!", and with this set-up the game is unplayable. So in the short term, with a tight budget in mind (!), what is the best way to go about upgrading to make such a game playable?

Bearing in mind I'm not a tech wizard with PC's, would an upgrade to 128MB improve the game much, or maybe a 3D accelerator be better. I assume this is down to cost and the PC specification.

Also, just a note that apart from a flight sim like this and my fave game Championship Manager 3, I don't intend to buy the very latest 3D heavy action games.

Any help would be great, thanks!!

[Paleo Pete]

I'd always go for the RAM upgrade first. Check the documentation for your video card, you might also be able to upgrade its memory as well, instead of an accelerator. My Matrox Mystique, for example, has 2MB onboard memory, but I can simply buy another chip and upgrade it to 8 or 16MB. That would improve video performance a lot, and is not that expensive.



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If you had everything...Where would you put it?

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[Paleo Pete]

I'd always go for the RAM upgrade first. Check the documentation for your video card, you might also be able to upgrade its memory as well, instead of an accelerator. My Matrox Mystique, for example, has 2MB onboard memory, but I can simply buy another chip and upgrade it to 8 or 16MB. That would improve video performance a lot, and is not that expensive.

If this post shows up twice, it's because I got an Internal Server error the first try, then it told me on retry I couldn't post twice in 60 seconds because flood control was activated...and it's not even raining!!

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If you had everything...Where would you put it?

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[Will Rickards]

Since your processor is a C300, I'd say the video card should be replaced with a newer one with 16 or 32 MB or onboard ram. Today's AGP video cards literally rock. You can add more regular RAM... but it is generally slower than video ram. Further depending on your 300 MHz processor to handle the RAM will slow it down.
I would recommend adding more regular RAM anyway, I think < 128 is just unbearable and recommend a min of 256 for any new system.

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Will Rickards ~ wrickard@home.com
http://www.willrickards.net