Poor man's upgrade.

[NickMeuir]

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!

[Ideas Man]

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

[SLH]

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

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!

[Ideas Man]

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

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

[NickMeuir]

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!

Nvidia GeForce 6800 won't do?

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.

[Cander]

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

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.

[DiGiTaIErRoR]

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).

[Cander]

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