Burning Out! Need Help!

[TwinAphex]

OK i really want a new video card, i've been sitting on my radeon 7500 for over a year now and am deperate for a change. I'm hoping to get something that will decently run hl2 but I don't have the cash to buy the brand new cards. I've been looking at HIS Radeon Pro IceQ (after tax 390 cdn) which is about what i can spend around for an upgrade. I currently have athlonxp 1700, MSI KT3-Ultra (4x agp), 2x512mb pc-2700 ram and Western Digital 120gig 8mb buffer. I'm horrible with money so i can't make huge upgrades all at once so i kinda gotta do it slow. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[peteroy]

Going for ATI based cards is a good choice if you plan to play Half-Life 2 a lot.

ATI has worked with Valve and it is expected that ATI cards will pefrom better on HL2 than Nvidia cards.

Same as Nvidia cards work better on Doom 3 as Nvidia worked with Id Software.

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<A HREF="http://www.clancas.net" target="_new">clan CHAOS</A>

 

[endyen]

If I were you, I would do the trade-up thing at <A HREF="http://shop.ati.com/tradeup.asp" target="_new">http://shop.ati.com/tradeup.asp</A>. Get the BBA 9800 128 meg for about $270.can.

 

[Crashman]

NO! Don't recommend trading up THAT card, a 7500 is still worth around $35! Perhaps trading up some old crap card he finds in a PC on the side of the road, but not any card that still has SOME value!

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[TwinAphex]

I'm just worried i may be paying for a inferior card, i've been looking through the forums and have noticed people talking about makingers using inferior ram and whatnot and this is all new to me, and that trade-up program is no good cause i have no credit card.

 

[Crashman]

ATI sets the standard for their cards and uses that standard on their cards. Discount makers often produce similar cards with inferior parts. Most reliable venders actually publish the RAM and clock speeds of the cards they sell.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[phial]

you suck!

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<A HREF="http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/you.html" target="_new">please dont click here! </A>
Brand name whores are stupid!

 

[SoDNighthawk]

I have a ATI 2MB Direct Draw card that was not even designed to run Direct 3D of course it is a chip soldered to an Intel motherboard in a Win95 HP Pavilion 8250.

He could hacksaw the chip out and trade them that.........of course the guy that owns this box I just clean&wiped for him might get a little annoyed.

Intel 266MHz with 2, TWO SD-RAM chips totalling 32MB lol. I through a 128 MB chip in to see if I could get it going faster then a row boat on dry land with the anchor overboard but no luck :lol: It will make a great typwriter.

Barton 3200+ 400MHz
A7N8X Deluxe
Air Cooled 45C
2x512 Corsair DDR 400 PC3200
GeForce FX5900
Two Maxtor 40Gig 8MB cach 7200rpm
SONY RW 52x/24x/52x
SONY DVD 16x/40x

 

[Crashman]

Intel 266MHz? I'd probably put a Celeron 700 on it using an adapter to set it at 1.80v, then add 128MB of RAM and sell it on the local market for $150. As far as adding RAM, those OLD chipsets had LOWER density requirements, I use OLD RAM so no problems here!

I think those ATI chips actually were DX compatable, that is, DX5!

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[SoDNighthawk]

He just wanted a wipe&reload and I hold my spare parts at home like a troll. I did install a 64MB graphics card just to see if it would fly and it did at the desktop but on the restarts there was allot of video corruption and I could not even give him the 64MB card for free because of it.

The onboard chipset contained some HP software imbedded and I had to reverse the Win95 drivers to function in Win98 SE for him. In other words I had to slide all the hardware drivers off the original HP Win95 recovery CD.

His keyboard has all the internet buttons volume knob and audio jacks built into it. He mainly wanted the Win98 installed. Make me jump through hoops ...............I bundled in tons of photo editing software for him and a full MS2000 suit and the stick of 128MB, so it could handle the save times on the MB for pictures. System is limited only at this point because of the 266MHz brick.

Barton 3200+ 400MHz
A7N8X Deluxe
Air Cooled 45C
2x512 Corsair DDR 400 PC3200
GeForce FX5900
Two Maxtor 40Gig 8MB cach 7200rpm
SONY RW 52x/24x/52x
SONY DVD 16x/40x