MX400 to buy or not to buy?

[Battousai^]

I finally accepted the fact that I have mistakenly bought a MX200 geforce 2 so Im turning the tides on the power of a MX400 can give me?

[wing7788]

Your AGP card may still be too slow if you are a hardcore gamer and/or your system is in the high end.

People would be able to help you more if you post your system specs and the applications you use.

[SMU_DORK]

He's right. Find out how the games you play actually draw and how they do lighting. A "better" card won't make much of a difference if it's the wrong card for the job or if your processor can't fully utilize it.

Either way, I've always felt turning the down the resolution, clip plane, color depth, or degrading the lighting/filter in game was worth the money I saved by not buying a new video card. Hell, sometimes you can't even notice the difference when you degrade some of the options - all I've ever cared about is frame rate.

Although your card isn't the best out there, it's certainly not garbage. Who cares who wins the "best gaming computer" pissing contest anyways.

My advice:
1) Kill all system tray applications. System tray icons aren't just icons with a tiny shell program running, those **** things are usually the full program just minimized and eat up lots of RAM and sometimes processor resources. why they don't make tray icons seperate programs that execute the real thing if you want to do anything other than basic tasks is beyond me. This stupid pop up killing program I'm currently running is using 7 MB of RAM. WTF!? 7MB to run a loop that reads window titles? Honestly, has anyone here ever made a program that ate that much RAM? Maybe it has a porn video waiting for me out in RAM if I press special keys on it... I'll go try to find it and report back later.

2) Try overclocking if you don't have heat issues.
3) Add more RAM if you don't have atleast 128MB.
4) Degrade the graphics in game and see if the difference is bearable.
5) THEN consider getting a new card/processor.

[NDD]

MX400 will give you more then twice pefrormance then MX200 (128bit memory + higher frequencies).
What system you got ?

Best Regards ...

[Battousai^]

My system specs

Tomato ZX98-AT mobo
PII 400 Mhz.
96 MB RAM PC100 CAS LATENCY 3 (cant get it to CAS 2 due to mobo bugs)
GeForce 2 MX200 64MB
Creative SB16
and a slow crappy HDD

[Sweeper]

First, even with the MX400 your not going to get the results your looking for with your current setup. May I suggest YOU:
Upgrade your HD. Pick up a 7200rpm/ATA100 (though your board may not utilize the ATA100) it's still worth the upgrade and you'll notice the difference. Good to have for future upgrades.
Then get rid of the MX200 and get the 400.
If possible, ram is cheap!!!! Get the system up to atleast 128mb.
Then later on UPGRADE the CPU. Find out what your MB supports and pick up a new CPU.


Regards,
Sweeper

[SMU_DORK]

I would get a faster CPU and more RAM before I got the MX400. Maybe if you were running (1.2 GHz & 256 RAM)+ I'd suggest the new card. I got the MX200 in a bundle (yeah yeah, crack all the bundle jokes you want, but I got a STEAL) and it's been doing just fine running FPS games and DAOC.

Programs rarely write to disk while running (outside of user-initiated output) because of all the RAM you can get nowadays. New HDD isn't needed unless you want to boost application load time, which in my opinion doesn't really matter. I used to care about HD specs back in the day, but when I buy them now I just grab the cheapest one that is the size I want. I guess I'd think differently if I were running a busy server though.

Bundle I got:
P4 1.5GHz, 60GB HDD, 256 RAM, MX200, 12X DVD, CD-RW (too lazy for ..x..x.. spec), all the usual peripherals & software... for $725 ($75 cheaper than advertised )
+ it was all set up for me which was a huge plus cause I needed the new comp ASAP. Came with a network card too - Guess who gets plugged into a satellite modem shared by 6 people in a week *does a stupid dance, making a fool of himself*