Way Crossover Board

29Apr/09Off

Way Crossover Board

Way Crossover Board

128mb or 256mb memory in graphics card upgrade?

I plan on upgrading my graphics card to an ATI Radeon 9550 128 bit AGPx8 card. My computer is OLD - Pentium 4, 1.8 Ghz, 512 mb ram, AGPx4 m-board. I don't game but I do CAD. What's best for me, considering my current hardware bottleneck position? I understand 256 mb may, under certain circumstances, keep the burden on the newer card and prevent crossover via my slow AGPx4 bus on the way to taxing the slow main processor, but is this overkill for my system and will it run much hotter than 128 mb?

Upgrading your video card isn't going to help you much, since the rest of your system is so slow. If your RAM isn't PC3200 (200 Mhz), then I'd recommend you buy two 1GB sticks of PC3200, and a good cpu heatsink. Why a good heatsink? Well, because the average 1.8A P4 would run at between 2.6 & 2.8 Ghz. Learn how to overclock.

Your other choice is going to be the Asrock VSTA motherboard, and an Intel E6300 cpu. This particular motherboard can use both DDR and DDR2 RAM. Even with a $59 PCI-E GeForce 6600 vanilla video card, plus the motherboard and processor, the total isn't much over $300. And then your system would be about 10 times as fast as it is today. Seriously.