good vid card upgrade vs mid-range cpu

[josemavicente]

ive been thinkingrecently on upgrading my 3dcard from a nvidia tnt2 32mb (this was of course one ht ebest during its time right?) into a geforce4 mx440.

my question is will performance improve drastically given my computer is a celeron 633mhz? also, how does the amount of RAM affect video card performance? i know that some of the computer's RAM is allocated to the video card right? thing is i got 440MHZ of SDRAM! well its not DDR but it still gets the job done... what do u guys think? is the 3d card upgrade worth it or should i really just upgrade the entire computer (costing me my arm and leg)?

thanks http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

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[iisbob]

The TNt was a decent card in it's time, though not quite up to Voodoo standards! http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

The Geforce 4 MX series are actually the old Geforce 2 GPU's-they will provide you with better performance than the old TNT, but they don't ( nor will they in the future ) support any of the new DirectX programming code for games. But they'll run any of the current and older games ok.

None of today's modern boards allocate system memory unless it's an onboard controller; the AGP apeture setting you see in BIOS allows you to use some of the system's memory to supplement the Video cards.

The celey you're running should be ok with the newer vid cards; they do require a little more " oomph " from CPU's than the older cards used too.

You might want to invest in a Geforce3 Ti if you can find one, much better product for the price-or even a Raedon 7500/8500 for better performance than the G4 MX series.

IMHO the geforce4 MX series should never have been introduced; they're like the ME of Vid cards. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif



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iisbob

Computer-Show me the Enterprise; no bloody A, no bloody B, and no bloody C-just the original...Mr Scott { from a STNG episode }

[josemavicente]

thanks for the info!

hmmm so if the GeForceIII is a lot better than the GeForceIV, is it because of its "titanium" label? what gives? hmmm..... GeForceIV uses DDR right?

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[iisbob]

Don't confuse the Geforce4 MX's with the Geforce$ Titanium series; they use entirely different GPU chipset's.

Geforce4 MX =nv17 { also the Geforce2=nv17 }, Geforce3=nv20, Geforce4=nv25

So you can see that the G4 MX cards are actually the old G2 GPU's; so the G3 Ti series is better than them-but not the G4 Ti series.

This is why i recommend not getting a G4 MX card, since you're still getting the old G2 card in effect.

Go here Geforce lineup (http://www.a1-electronics.co.uk/Graphics_Cards/GeForce4/Nvidia_GeForce4.shtml) ;and take a look at the chart, you can see the differnce in the memory bandwidth and no# of pixels per sec that make the differnce between the chipsets. notice that the new Geforce4 MX 420 is outclassed by even the older Geforce2 Pro card. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/rolleyes.gif





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iisbob

Computer-Show me the Enterprise; no bloody A, no bloody B, and no bloody C-just the original...Mr Scott { from a STNG episode }