upgrade help -- am i cpu limited?

[jbarcroft9]

hi i have a socket478 p4 2.2ghz, 768mb pc133, a geforce4ti 4200. I also have a dell inspiron6000 with 512mb ddr2, pentiumM 1.6, and a 128mb x300. so they are pretty much equivilent gaming machines, well my lappy is better at HL2. Anyway i was going to get a x700pro for my desktop... i 've been able to price it at $99 retail, sometimes. is this worth it, or will it be processor limited? should i stick with my ti4200? I also have a athlon xp2000+ box that is pc133 and has an agp slot, but i keep my video card in the p4 box, cause i think it has a bit more power, thoughts?
thanks alot,
- justin

 

[endyen]

Is that a northwood A? If it is, it uses a 100/400 fsb. While at stock it would become the limiting factor, with the 700pro. If you were to overclock the chip, that would help.
Just the same, you will see a large difference, with the new gfx card. Make sure it's not the newer PCI-express before you buy.

 

[Crashman]

He's using PC133 so the bus speed of the P4 really doesn't matter. I'd definately sell a dog like that to some poor unsuspecting fool.

 

[slvr_phoenix]

Ja. If that's really PC133 then I've definately got to agree vigorously with Crashman on this one.

 

[apache_lives]

i had a celeron 1700 with PC133 ram, then i got a board supporting DDR266 and had one stick of 128mb and that alone boosted the performance by 50% in 3DMark2001 with the old Ti4200

 

[slvr_phoenix]

Partly out of boredom and partly to prove a point to geniuses who were trying to cut corners on client PCs we ship, I did some extensive benchmarking once of a 3GHz P4 NWC with DDR200 and 400 in SC and DC. It's amazing to see how rapidly the performance curves down when you bandwidth starve a P4.

Granted, this is a NWA, so it's bandwidth is only half of a NWC, but then it's PC133 RAM, which is only slightly more than half the bandwidth of SC DDR200. So it's actually about the same horror. 😱 That poor box.

 

[jbarcroft9]

yes, i have a 400fsb chip, it was out of a dell 2400. when i got it, it had 2 slots for ddr266 and no agp slot. I bought an intel845 board off ebay for ~$20 with sdram slots because i had alot more of it and i thought the board would be cheaper that way. now i think im regretting it. i think i should put the dell board back in with the integrated video and just use my laptop for gaming. more thoughts?