Time for an upgrade

[Guest]

I currently have about $300 dollars saved up for a computer upgrade. I am 16 years old and very much into computer gaming. As of now my computer consists of:

PIII 700 (100x7)
128meg PC100 Cas2
Intel D815eea desktop board (yuck!)
Diamond Viper V770 Ultra

In an atempt to keep my compuer up to date, I installed a larger heatsink on my video card's GPU (connected with a thin layer of superglue, as I had no thermal glue) and put the stock hsf on the opposite side of the card, connected to a themal pad. I have the card clocked at 175 core, 212 memory.

My major problem is my monitor, It's manufactured by NCD, product 19cp. It horizontal refresh rate has a range of 8khz (about 72khz - 80khz). To compensate for the lack of lower resolution compatibility, on resolutions below 800 x 600 It duplicates the image, and has two wide images stacked on top of each other, and on 1024 x 768, It simply wont hit at all. This means that all games I play must be at 1152 x 864 or above.

Currently my video card, even overclocked, cant hit any godly frame rates. My 3Dmark2000 (not 2001) score is 2017. Which is enough to play unreal, or counter-strike, but I'm afraid games like Giants or any other newly arriving game just wont do.

I believe that upgrading my video card would be the best choice for an upgrade. I am considering either the Geforce2 GTS, The Raidon 64DDR (might have to save a little more) or the KyroII. At only 150 the Kyro II looks very appealing, but I'm not sure how well it will handle high resolutions. any suggestions?

 

[jerry557]

Depends on what kind of card you want. I mean you can go with ATI cards which are quite well priced (Up to $300). Or a GeForce 2 MX which is a good card that will run all of today's games and throughout the year. And will only cost you around $130 (under $100 for OEM versions). Though they my be cheap, nothing is at all wrong with a GF2 MX.

When choosing a video card you need to balance price with what you want. By next year at the latest you will be needing to upgrade your CPU to something higher in order to play the big 3D games, but a P3 700 should get you by for now. If you really want something sweet, wait and save more and see if the GeForce 2 Ultra's drop in price when the GF3's hit the market. I assure you that it will be well worth the wait if you can get one of those! And that would last you a long while.

But you have to be careful when you upgrade a video card because sometimes you run into compatibility problems if your motherboard isn't all that great. I personally don't like Intel motherboards since the one I had kind of "blew up" on me. I can't remember the exact model but I installed a new video card and it caused that motherboard to burn out, destroyed the CPU and and fried the graphics card. To this day I still can't figure out why that system blew up everywhere. My friend's intel motherboard had a problem with the PCI Bus and couldn't get any modems to work. That is why I refuse to use an Intel motherboard.

Or get a better monitor...I got a real good NEC monitor for only $299 and supports a wide range of resolutions. Think about it and do your research and make sure there isn't any known compatibility problems.