Poor man's upgrade.

Yes, it's time to upgrade.

I'm more of a gamer than any thing, so video card/motherboard is priority. I'm not too swift with hardware I might add.

GeForce FX 5200 PCI (Yes, PCI)
My mother board has no AGP slot!!
AMD Athlon 1800.
384 RAM.
Windows 2000 SP4.

I don't have too much money to spend, but I'm looking to get a new motherboard(a must) and ATI Radeon 9600.

Any one have any idea how much a motherboard would be? A decent and reliable one atleast? And is the 9600 OK? I'm looking forward to play Half-Life 2...

Thanks! :)

I'd wait until closer to HL2s release before upgrading and chances are, if you can't play Far Cry, forget about HL2.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Ideas Man
if you can't play Far Cry, forget about HL2.

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HL2's minimum requirements are way lower than Far Cry's, it has major scalability.

But, yeah, you should wait until HL2's out before upgrading; the next generation card may have come out by then!

Quote:

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Originally posted by SLH
HL2's minimum requirements are way lower than Far Cry's, it has major scalability.

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Really? Nice, might be able to play it myself then :D!

Quote:

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Originally posted by SLH
HL2's minimum requirements are way lower than Far Cry's, it has major scalability.

But, yeah, you should wait until HL2's out before upgrading; the next generation card may have come out by then!

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Nvidia GeForce 6800 won't do? :p

But, something like that I just can't afford.
That's why I was leaning towards the Radeon 9600...? I dunno what I'm doing actually. :D

Yeah wait till HL2 comes out. By the time it does, better upgrades will be the price of what you can afford currently. :p

You really should try to get yourself up to 1 gig of memory if nothing else

And btw I (ahem) downloaded that leaked alpha of HL2 some time ago. It ran ok on an AMD 1800. Slightly choppy sometimes, but I hade graphic settings turned up.

I doubt he'll ever need(nor use anywhere close to) 1 GB of RAM. Unless you do CAD(3DSMAX/Maya), or something which consumes a lot of memory.

I have 512 MB DDR, and rarely use it, even at 256 MB DDR I rarely had issues(And I use 3DSMAX6).

Maybe not need, but it helps alot. Certainly saves alot of swapping.