Need Pentium 3 hardware

[Steven Scott]

Now that i know that my ati rage pro card is a dinosaur and is tthe reason why I can't play games like Halo,Company of Heroes or Gothic 3, (Okay so i am an old guy new to gaming w/ too much time on my hands) I now need to find a graphics card that is compatible with my ancient pentium 3 processor. Any suggestions?

Thanks

 

[Calculagator]

You need a new computer if you want to play those games. The PIII is just too old.

 

[mgolus]

You probably won't be able to find anything brand new that will work with your Pentium 3 system. If you can find one used and you have an AGP slot in your machine, an ATI Radeon 9800 pro or an NVidia GeForce TI 4600 would be about the best cards you could put in your system. Even if you find something to upgrade your old Rage Pro card, Company of Heroes and Gothic 3 will require much more powerful processor than your Pentium 3.

As it sounds like you don't want to invest much money in to a new computer, my advice is this. People practically just throw away old Pentium 4 or Athlon XP systems these days. You could probably pick one up for super cheap (or possibly even free) on Craigslist or the classified ads in your newspaper. If you can find an Athlon 64 or Core 2 Duo system, that would be even better. Then just pick up a used PCIe graphics card with at least 512mb of RAM.

 

[Math Geek]

to upgrade the graphics will need a new psu as it is probably only 150 watts or so and won't support anything new. the rest of the system will hold back any new card that will play these games making the upgrade not worth it.

for a modest budget you can get a whole new system that will work fine for you to play those and newer games. since your using such an old system, i assume you're happy with entry level and won't need all the eye candy pulse pounding super rigs out there. what kind of budget would you have to work with? can go as low as $3-400 for a complete system that includes windows, case, hdd and everything but keyboard, mouse and monitor.

of course you can spend more and get more. give us an idea what we can work with and you'll get plenty of ideas to help out.

 

[Math Geek]

You probably won't be able to find anything brand new that will work with your Pentium 3 system. If you can find one used and you have an AGP slot in your machine, an ATI Radeon 9800 pro or an NVidia GeForce TI 4600 would be about the best cards you could put in your system. Even if you find something to upgrade your old Rage Pro card, Company of Heroes and Gothic 3 will require much more powerful processor than your Pentium 3.

As it sounds like you don't want to invest much money in to a new computer, my advice is this. People practically just throw away old Pentium 4 or Athlon XP systems these days. You could probably pick one up for super cheap (or possibly even free) on Craigslist or the classified ads in your newspaper. If you can find an Athlon 64 or Core 2 Duo system, that would be even better. Then just pick up a used PCIe graphics card with at least 512mb of RAM.

funny you say this cause i actually have one sitting here right now i don't know what to do with. has a p4, 1 gb ram, hd4500 agp card and a 160 gb hdd.

 

[Calculagator]

Here's a nice desktop. The video card is not high end, but you should be able to play games with it.
http://www.costco.com/.product.100131210.html?cm_sp=RichRelevance-_-categorypageHorizontalTop-_-CategoryTopProducts&cm_vc=categorypageHorizontalTop|CategoryTopProducts
Check out the Tom's guides to building your own if you would like a better deal.