I've been using a Pentium III for the past few months and now i've just upgrated to a P4 2.8ghz HT. I was looking for a 3.2ghz but it was kinda outta my budget so i settled for this one. The problem is i can't see the difference in speed from the P III. When i play GTA San Andreas it still plays at the slow sluggish speed even with 9250 ATI Radeon 128mb. How can i increase the speed??

Games are basically graphics card domain not CPU although a faster CPU can and does increase quality/frame rates.

Upgraded to a P4?
Same mobo?
Have you set the bios right?

Tt Lanfire
MSI K8N Diamond
AMD64 3000+'Venice'
1gb pc4400
OCZ Powerstream 520w
6600GT
WDCaviar 160gb sata x2

;~}

"still plays at the slow sluggish speed even with 9250 ATI Radeon 128mb"

Who ever told you the Radeon 9250 is a good card? Most of them use 64-bit memory & are not great for gaming. You could also add another 512MB RAM.

ASUS A7N8X-X
Athlon XP 1800+
8.5 x 200MHz
1024MB PC3200 2.5-3-3-7
Asus A9550GE/TD 128MB
WinME/WinXP Pro SP2

The radeon 9250 is a poor excuse for a gaming card.

FX-57 @ 3.1ghz
4GB of OCZ PC-4200
500GBx4 drive array
Sapphire X850 XT-PE
Fujitsu 1920x1080 projector

9250 is a slow card. mainly used for office work and standard game. like... insaniquarium, or popcap games.

better upgrade your memory. or your VGA card.
both if possible.

Athlon 64 2800+ @ 2.63 Ghz Stock Cooling
Timings:2-3-2-5
V-Gen 512MB pc3200
DFI Lanparty UT NF3
Abit R9550 VGuru XTurbo
525Mhz/300Mhz

Ok, Ok i get it, it's not the best card out there but hey it's got 500mhz of clock core speed ok that should be enough to play standard games such as NFS2, GTA and a few others. Somehow i don't think the bios is set right, can someone give me some tips, pleeeease, and about cheap but good graphics cards??

Have you reformat your hard drive and reinstall windows after upgrade?? If you upgrade from P3 to P4, I assume u have a different motherboard and different chipset... Also make sure you have the latest driver for all.... Also for GTA San Andreas, it has this special video display setting (Frame Limit = On "30fps Max" and if u turn it off, u can get pass 30fps barrier... Are you using a AGP or PCI radeon 9250?

TMP-Man

Asus A7V classic rev 1.05
Athlon XP 2100+ @ 101x20 1.75v
768MB PC133 RAM @ 134Mhz 2-2-2
40GB 5400RPM + 120GB 7200RPM HD
128MB Geforce FX5200 128bit

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!

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

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??

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

;~}