Hello whenever I play Halo on my Duron 850mhz the game will run ----VERY----- slow in some areas, I notice if I overclock to 950mhz the game will run much better so i'm thinking it's time for a small cpu upgrade. I'm on pertty much the smallest budget ever and I was thinking about getting an AMD Athlon 1.2GHZ. Do you guys think the extra cache and speed will make a noticeable impact in gameplay?

Just for information I have an Ati Radeon 9250 pci graphics card with 128mb of video memory

is your duron a socket A? I know my spare 800mhz duron isn't a socket it's the slot type and good luck finding a faster one of them.

if it is a socket A then I believe that you will have a noticeable improvment. and if it's enough to make you happy then it was well worth the money.

if your budget is at least this I'd go for this one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...

Shuttle AN35N-Ultra
AMD 2600B-M O/C 2.3Gig
Geil 1.5gb 3200DDR
Gforce 6800 Ultra O/C
UV Clear Acrylic Blue case

how much system RAM do you have?
and which motherboard do you have?

Coming from 850MHz, every extra clock will help you if you running any newer game, BUT only if supported by ample RAM and of course, a good video card.

It would be great if you could pick up a new system altogether, but if you cannot spend money for a new rig right now, what I would suggest is that you pick up a used AGP card (assuming your board has a AGP slot) that is at least a 9800 or equivalent. That must help matters a little.

Tell us what motherboard you have, and we can tell you how much you can push that Duron to.

Kailas Shastry

3000+ Venice, A8N-E, 768MB DDR266, 160GB Barracuda, 380W Cooler Master

"Do you guys think the extra cache and speed will make a noticeable impact in gameplay?"

Your system is extremely weak for gaming & not just because of the CPU. The R9250 is probably a 64-bit card & doesn't support DX9 & the fact that it's a PCI card make matters even worse. As Kailas mentioned, we'd need to know your motherboard & RAM to be able to give you a complete answer.

I have an ECS K7sem 1.0 motherboard and it does have an AGP slot but the catch is that it will only work with Nvidia graphics cards and I have tested it for myself and the mobo manual says that to.

I currently have 256MB of ram and the reason I don't leave it overclocked to 950mhz is because it is very unstable even thought it has good temps for a Duron (43C),

Also if i overclock to 900mhz my USB ports no-longer work thats odd lol but 950mhz everything works just unstable.

The Duron is socketA so I have some upgrade options.

Hope you guys reply :P

Ati+AMD=Deadly combo.