upgrade?

[mark18]

Hi all, first post.

I have an old Dell Dimension with Pentium II. I'm pretty sure my games don't look as good or play as smooth as they should. I want to upgrade my video card (currently STB nVIDIA TNT 16MB).

The manual says the agp slot can take 2x agp and 16mb. What can I get that qualifies or do I need a new motherboard? I can't spent more than $100-150 on everything.

I mostly see the sports games I play most affected (EA Sports) and I just bought Links 2001 and it keep freezing because of video problems (I think).

Thanks for the help.

[morriswindgate]

A Gforce or ATI will improve the situation, but I would say that the best thing to do would be bite the bullet until you have a couple of hundred more to spend the build a decent machine. Also you did not state how much RAM you have or if the hard drives are 7200rpm units.
From the fact that it is a Gate, the logical improvments would be some addition RAM, A new Faster Hard Drive, an ATA 133 Controller card to run the drive from, and a video card. I have put a 32MB Gforce in a 450MHZ Gate with no problems.

If you want to up the machine, here is a list

Kingston Value RAM 128MB PC133 168Pins SDRAM $32.00
MAXTOR Quiet Drive 20GB 7200RPM $67.00
PROMISE ULTRA133TX2 CONTROLLER CARD $30.00
ATI OEM RADEON 7000 VE 32MB DDR W/TVATI $36.00

[mark18]

384meg RAM, I believe 7200 HD.

I don't want the trouble of reloading everything on a new HD and I lost some of the cd's for some of my programs (is there an easy way to transfer everything?).

I also would prefer a minor upgrade instead of a new system.

[morriswindgate]

384 of RAm should be fine
To keep from reloading you use an imaging program like drive imange or norton ghost. Also for free you can use xxcopy32 found on the internet.