Gaming performance question

[kahuna1994]

I am currently running and old PII 400 system with 96MB of RAM and a STB Velocity4400 TNT videocard with 16MB of memmory. I am trying to decide if it's worth my money to buy a new video card and increase my system RAM in an attempt to play more current 3D games. The other option being to basically upgrade my whole system with a new processor, motherboard, etc. I am most interested right now in running flight simulator type games at higher resolution and frame rate than I am currently getting with my system. I would greatly appreciate anyone's opinion or suggestions on this matter. Thanks!

P.S. Let me thank everyone who helped me with my sound card dilemma last week. I really appreciate it.

[HAL9000]

Well, you could probably use a bit of everything. Get 256Mb of RAM, at these prices, it's almost a waste not to. For video, consider the ATI Radeon LE 32Mb DDR. You will get good frame rates and a fantastic picture. After that, you could consider maxing out your board with the largest processor it can support. If you're going to go that far, then you might as well look at a total rebuild with a motherboard/processor, video card, RAM.

[mike breck]

Hi Kahuna,

One of my computers is P2 450, Elsa Erazor X Geoforce 256, 256 mb PC 100 Ram.

It can take every game I throw at it.

A year ago, I upgraded the graphics card from a Riva TNT Ultra to the geoforce 256 and that certainly allowed the system to keep up with the latest games.

Putting in a P2 450 would certainly help (that's the highest CPU my board will take) - if you can get one.

As Hal said, increasing your Ram to 256 will help.

You don't want to spend to much money on updating the graphics card on this system. ... so buy a Radeon as Hal suggested.

Also you could put in a Geoforce 256 or Geoforce 2 MX.

The Geoforce 2 mx might be under-utilised in a P2 400 or 450. But who cares? As long as you get a bit more performance out of the system.

Shop around for the best bargain. I got my Geoforce 256 in a sale for about $50 and it does the job. I have read, the original geoforce is nearly as good as the Geoforce 2 mx.

The retail prices of these cards are all about the same anyway. Quite cheap.

However, even without a CPU upgrade, I think with more ram and one of these graphics cards you should see a good improvement. So try that first.

Save the rest of your money for your next system.

But keep the P2 400 as well. It's still a good system and great for general computing and office work.

And it's nice and very useful to have two computers.

HTH

Mike