I've been trying to figure out what to do with my aging system. It's an AMD athlon xp 1800+ with 512 pc2100 DDR RAM and an geforce mx400 video card. Throw it out the window is one thought, but the MB still has a little room for improvement.

Right now the issue I'm struggling with is video cards... and money. I was told even the worst system can run decent games if it has a powerful enough video card and that processors arent such a critical factor anymore. Is it true? Can I toss something like a geforce 6600 or 6800 based card in and expect to run recent games smoothly with maybe more than the lowest settings? For now it can handle things like world of warcraft, just not very well. Is there any hope for this system lasting much longer or is it time to break the bank and get a whole new computer?

related to all this, I'm also wondering how much running a geforce 6600 or 6800 in an AGP 4x slot is going to slow it down compared to the same card in an 8x slot. would it still be worth putting a card like that in a 4x slot (assuming the card works in a 4x) or will the slot hinder the card too much to make it worth getting something that powerful? Really not sure if 4x is restricting to cards like that

To get maximum efficiency from a gaming rig you need a "balanced" configuration or there is going to be a bottleneck from the much weaker component.

You can't just throw in any faster card in that system and expect great performance from it. My advice is to dispose of the system as a whole if you have that option and build a better system, or get a mid-low end card that is within you budget and be content.

One other thing, on that system you are not going to notice any performance difference running an 8x card at 4x. I would recommend a 9800SE or 9600XT, Newegg's refurb page usually have them available and they are inexpensive.

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why is the bandwidth of an agp 4x slot 1.064GiB and the bandwidth of almost every agp 4x card many times higher than that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_NVIDIA_Graphics_Processing_Units

here's an old article that may help

http://www.cpuplanet.com/features/article.php/2117941

Sabre, I was looking at ATI radeon 9600xt's and sapphire 9600xt's but I'm not entirely convinced they'll work in an AGP 4x 2.0 slot. I emailed ATI about it and, like good tech support people, they gave me a link to the specs. Specs! why didnt I think of that?!... frickin waste of email...

BFG's good. Their specs specifically say AGP 2.0 and their tech supporters specifically say "yes, it will work". But apparently an nvidia 6600gt oc is too much for me and 6200s are no good. Too bad they dont deal with ATI

This is what ATI's specs for a radeon 9600xt say about AGP:
"...or compatible with AGP 4X (1.5V), 8X (0.8v) or Universal AGP 3.0 bus configuration (4X/8X). "

Looks like that means it will work in my 4x 1.5v 2.0 slot, but AGP is messed up, and lines like that are open to interpretation.

I just want to be sure before I spend the money and open something I cant return. I want to know if a Sapphire 9600xt card will run in AGP 2.0, too, since most 9600xt's I can find are Sapphire's. Even ones just listed as ATI Radeon 9600xt's turn out to be Sapphire. So I'm thinking there's a good chance I could end up with a Sapphire no matter what I think I'm ordering. If those are 2.0 compatible then no worries, but their specs are about 4 lines long. Not sure if specs for one card apply to anything with that chipset.

So anyone know anything about Sapphire/ATI radeon 9600xt's being AGP 2.0 Compatible?

I might have to ask this somewhere else. This thread's getting old...