Sorry to say so but a high core clock doesn't mean you get good graphic. As an example a 6800GT works with a GPU clock of 350MHz and a 6600GT with 500MHz. Still the 6800GT is up to twice as fast as the 6600GT. The reason is a differently build GPU and that of the 6800GT is a lot more powerful. The problem is that the Radeon 9250 is as bad for gaming as a FX5200 and if you ot the 9250SE it's even worse. An old TI4200 would be a lot faster than the 9250 you have. The only problem is that the TI4200 only works with DirectX8.1 and so there's no warranty you're able to play the newest games! Actual games are 95 to 99% graphiccard oriented so the graphic card does nearly all the work. Example1: I occed my Athlon64 3000+ from 1800MHz to 2700MHz (=50%) but in 3DMark 05 I only got 3% more points with my 6600GT because that benchmark is as graphic oriented as the actual games. Example2: In the first months of 2004 I got a FX5900XT to replace the old Geforce2 GTS in my old Athlon Thunderbird 1,2@1,33GHz system (512MB SD Ram) and suddenly I was able to play NFSU2 and other games I barely made the minimal cpu requirements smoothly at 1280x1024 pixels at full or nearly full graphic! If you invested into a good graphic card instead of the CPU/Board upgrade you might have been able to play the game in better quality. About a cheap upgrade I just choose a Nvidia 6200 to upgrade an old Pentium3 866MHz but I ran into trouble because the card produces graphic errors and also crashes in the above mentioned Athlon system after maximal 10 to 15 minutes with every game! Better don't try that. I think I try to get a Radeon 9550 or 9600 as replacement!

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The only current game that rely's mostly on CPU rather than GPU is The sims 2, otherwise games love powerful graphics cards. If you want to see a noticable increase I'd say you should upgrade somewhere in the range of the X600XT or X700. Doug Windows Xp Pro x64 AMD Sempron 3000+ 1.8ghz 1 Gig Ram pc2700 Nforce 4 Motherboard Radeon X700 256mb Realtek Ac 97 Onboard Audio Thermaltake 430W Power Supply

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To answer TMP-Man's question, yes i did reinstall windows and the card that i have is AGP. The thing is the pentium 3 that i had had an AGP slot that only supported 4x and now that the new board supports up to 8x, i just thought that it would be a bit more faster, especially with 512mb or ram that i have as suppose to the 320 that i had in the P3:-(. Anyway i guess pretty soon i'm gonna have to get me an x700 then, or atleast a 9600, if it's recommended!!. One last question that i have is, what actually makes a graphics card good for gaming, memory, core speed, GPU, what is it axactly??

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It's a mix of what you said and lots of pipelines. Tt Lanfire MSI K8N Diamond AMD64 3000+'Venice' 1gb pc4400 OCZ Powerstream 520w 6600GT WDCaviar 160gb sata x2 ;~}

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