[magatsu1]

Would a GeForce 3ti give any sort of improvement over a G4 mx ?
I know someone who is selling one on the cheap.

Or should I just sod it, save up and buy somethin' proper like an 9700 pro ?

[Fury]

Bleh, get a Radeon 9600 Pro or non-Pro.

[IceFire]

I'm with Fury on that one...get a 9600 or a 9600Pro or a 9600XT.  Range from just over $100 Canadian to $299 depending on the card and the packaging.  If cost concerns you, aim for the OEM cards (the ones that come in a small box with a small manual and a driver CD - the rest is fluff).

If you consider that too expensive...go for a 9200.  In all of those cases, you're getting more than the GeForce 3.

Even so, you will see a difference between GeForce 3 and GeForce 4 MX (which is a GF2 in disguise).

[magatsu1]

I understand 9600XTs (and others) get Half Life 2 in the bundle
(or a voucher for the moment).

Sounds like the '600 gets the

[Fury]

I doubt you'll see HL2 bundled with those cards, most likely you'll just get a piece of paper which says you can order the game when it's out. For free? Hell if I know. And there's XT and TX versions, I haven't checked what's the friggin' difference but you should do some research as to avoid buying something else you wanted. I hate those namings which are simply created to confuse potential customers.

By the way, stay clear of Radeon 9800SE All-in-Wonder if you need a card with good performance. That sucker has half of it's rendering pipelines disabled. Sure you can enable them but the reason of them being disabled is 50% of those are faulty and failed to pass the test. Well, ATI sure knows how to make money even with cards that are partially faulty, just disable the components which do not work properly and add all-in-wonder features and you've got cheap Radeon 9800 with all-in-wonder features but poor performance.

[Liberator]

I've always felt that the All-In-Wonder is an example of false advertising.  To the best of my knowledge, no AIW card has had the same performance as the supposedly identical non-AIW card.

Save a hundred+ bucks and invest in a standard Radeon and spend the other money on a TV Wonder Pro.

[J3Vr6]

Will a ATI radeon 9x00 work with a 1.5 ghz amd computer?  I want to upgrade soon and I heard that really fast cards won't work on slow computers or something like that.  Is a 1.5 considered slow?

[Triple Ace]

I need me a new card but can't afford something really expensive.

[IceFire]

Originally posted by J3Vr6
Will a ATI radeon 9x00 work with a 1.5 ghz amd computer?  I want to upgrade soon and I heard that really fast cards won't work on slow computers or something like that.  Is a 1.5 considered slow?

Whoever told you that is definately off their rocker.  I could put my relatively new Radeon 9700Pro in my old Pentium III board with no problems.  There are a couple of things to be aware of but nothing that carte blanche says that you can't use a newer card in an older machine.

Here's a couple things to keep in mind:

1) AGP port...almost all new cards are AGP 4X/8X (and sometimes support 2X) compatible.  Most of this has to do with the amount of voltage your board supplies to the AGP port.  The best of the old boards have more than enough, some of the cheaper ones may not work.

2) A top end card, provided that number 1 is fufilled, will work just fine and dandy in your system.  But in games where you have of CPU processing required don't expect a massive jump in speed.  Image quality should go up, but FPS will probably stay virtually the same.  Both CPU and VPU/GPU are important to the experience.

So you can upgrade your 1.5 Athlon with probably few problems.  Yes its kind of considered slow these days (the current Athlons are clocked at 2.2 but are generally as powerful as 2.8 through 3.2ghz) but provided you have a good motherboard you shouldn't have any issues.  Just remember that some games will not benefit from the video card upgrade as much as others (depeneds on their skew to CPU or graphics processing).

[Fury]

3) New graphics card requires more juice from the power supply than old. So make sure you power supply is good enough to run all devices. With less than 300W power supplies you can run into problems, depending of course how much devices you have running and whether your power supply is of good quality.

[diamondgeezer]

Originally posted by IceFire
So you can upgrade your 1.5 Athlon with probably few problems.  Yes its kind of considered slow these days...

Dude, please don't say that or I'll feel obliged to go buy a new chip...

[Admiral LSD]

Originally posted by IceFire
1) AGP port...almost all new cards are AGP 4X/8X (and sometimes support 2X) compatible.  Most of this has to do with the amount of voltage your board supplies to the AGP port.  The best of the old boards have more than enough, some of the cheaper ones may not work.

This is the thing to watch out for. Not all 4X/8X cards are backward compatible with 1X/2X slots. The problem is that 4X/8X cards run on a nominal voltage of 1.5V and 1X/2X slots typically supply 3.3 so you most likely fry both the motherboard and card if you plug a 1.5V card into a 3.3V slot. Some cards are designed to handle this, my 9500Pro (and possibly other Radeons too) for instance worked just as well in my old Pentium II board (which only had a 2X slot) as it did in my 8RDA+ nForce2 board (which has an 8X slot). Just make sure you check first.

[J3Vr6]

Well I don't have a 1.5 ghz amd to upgrade yet, but I just found out some very good news.

[IceFire]

Originally posted by Admiral LSD


This is the thing to watch out for. Not all 4X/8X cards are backward compatible with 1X/2X slots. The problem is that 4X/8X cards run on a nominal voltage of 1.5V and 1X/2X slots typically supply 3.3 so you most likely fry both the motherboard and card if you plug a 1.5V card into a 3.3V slot. Some cards are designed to handle this, my 9500Pro (and possibly other Radeons too) for instance worked just as well in my old Pentium II board (which only had a 2X slot) as it did in my 8RDA+ nForce2 board (which has an 8X slot). Just make sure you check first.

Thanks for pointing it out in detail...I mentioned that some support the 2X boards but I forgot to mention the possible danger in inserting a 4X /8X board into a 3.3v slot.  Good point

[magatsu1]

I read GPUs have "keys" that will prevent the wrong type of card being inserted into an incompatible AGP. I understand 2x slots are quite rare nowadays.

I'm avoiding the ATi All in Wonder 'cos I don't use things like TV out or multi-monitoring etc. I quite like the look of the Sapphire bundles.

9600/9800 Xt and above ship with a voucher and ATi website internet key as regards to HL2, depending on the bundle (obviously).

Strange how CPUs in the region of -2GHZ are considered slow when most top end games are only just breaking the 1ghz mark
( I think Halo was 1.2) Though I imagine DX9 will change this.