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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Garpy who wrote (11311)	9/24/2000 1:03:08 PM
From: Michael G. Potter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

Tae, it depends on exactly what version of the BH6 you have, but you can do the c566->850 overclock and you can also put at least a PIII 700 in it. You'll get a big jump from changing CPU's and the PIII 700's have come down in price so much that it almost doesn't pay to do the C566 overclock. You'll also save money by not having to replace your motherbaord (and maybe your memory, I'm not 100% certain about how picky the Duron MB's are). You can't be that big a FPS player if you haven't upgraded yet. A cheap upgrade is to a 3dfx Voodoo3 card (around $70). You'll lose 32-bit 3d graphics, but your TNT doesn't have the fillrate to really do that well anyway. If the FPS games you like are based on the Unreal/Unreal Tournament games, then the V3 series play them very, very well. You can also get a 32 meg TNT2 card (stay away from vanta or M64, get the TNT2 or TNT2 ultra cards) for somewhere close to $100. If you want to spend closer to $150, I would have to give the nod to the GF2 MX cards. The 3dfx V4 cards are good, but the NVIDIA card does have more features. The next jump is to around $300. All of the cards in that price range (NVIDIA GF2, ATi Radeon, and 3dfx Voodoo5) are very good. NVIDIA has better Quake3 benchmarks, ATI has very good benchmark scores as well plus some good TV/DVD features, and the Voodoo5 cards are slower in Q3, but they have the best Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA). To be honest with you, if you're not a hardcore gamer, the TNT you already have or the cheap V3 option should do fine until next spring when the next generation of cards are released. You can take the money you save and invest it <grin>. I have yet to find an investing or business program that needs the 3D power that even the TNT has. Just about all the cards do 2D very well (Matrox seems to get the nod more here). Multi-monitors seems to be more important and the V3 PCI cards would give you that. You can even use it as your primary card for the games it does better in. The Matrox G400 dual-head solution is also pretty decent. The GF2 MX dual-head option is more expensive than the regular version and it is a little immature (drivers are still early in the improvement cycle). I personally have a V5 5500, but I used the best FSAA as my criteria. I probably could have survived with my V3 as I rarely play games, but I managed to get the V5 very, very cheap. It does have nice 2D on my 19" monitor. Michael