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jerrygarcia · 06-13-2002, 06:56 PM

I'm in the process of upgrading the video card at work or should I say shopping to upgrade. Here's a little background. I am a firefighter and work on one of three shifts, 11 men on a shift. We have 2 computers networked on DSL. #1 has a GF2 MX 400 and #2 has an AGP video card that barely plays solitare. I'm looking to upgrade #1 and swap the MX card to the other.

#1
XP1600+
GF2 MX 300 64mb
128mb PC133 - I'm also adding at least another 128mb
98SE

#2
Pentium/Celery 633
Crap video
128mb PC133
98SE

A lot of games are played and the GF2 MX just doesn't want to keep up all the time and the other is obsolete. Just looking for your opinion on how far to upgrade. I think one of the outgoing GF3's or the GF4 Ti 4200 or maybe the 4400 is within our monetary limits ( depending on what kind of deals we can find......Hey Doc!) I really want to spend less than $200.00 I have a GF3 Ti500 myself and love it but those are getting pretty hard to find and the price went up. Price vs. performance is pretty big, where is the big breakover?

Here's some of the games;
Starwars
Medal of Honor
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Half-Life CS
Predator vs Alien

Just a little side note, can you imagine trying to keep 2 computers running smoothly with up to 45 different people doing their own thing on the computers? These computers are used around 18 hours a day at the least. What a pain it is trying to keep it running!!

TOAD6147 · 06-13-2002, 07:42 PM

Well, you don't want to get carried away and cause a reverse situation. I was just in this quandry and wound up getting the GForce2 GTS-V from Newegg for about $48 shipped. This is a really decent card for the money and you won't do any better until you double or tripple the money. I don't know how the GForce card you already have would compair to this one but for that price you can get two so that they are both equal in the vid card category but then you're left with the CPU inbalance. Will the Pentium board support a faster clock? If you can get it up to 1 Ghz or higher and identical vid cards you can have two decent machines upgraded with additional memory for that $200 you were going to spend just on a vid card for one machine.

jerrygarcia · 06-13-2002, 07:50 PM

The GF2 MX 400 will match up with the 633 pretty good. It's not used for gaming that much but will play the games okay with the MX. It is used mostly for surfing. The other is pretty much a gaming machine, that's why I want to go big with it. It is not really a big deal that the vid cards match.

I'm trying to please the masses for gaming and pleasing the minority with keeping the cost down.

MBMASTER · 06-14-2002, 09:27 AM

On a $200 budget I think the gf3ti200 with 128 meg would be a good choice. It will run all the games you metioned and you will still have money left ofer for a small memory upgrade.

MSI VC 8851-120 G3TI200-TD128 GF3TI200 128MB DDR DVI&TV OUT
GeForce3 Ti200 DDR 256 BIT,400MHz/3.8 ns Memory,350 MHz RAMDAC DVI-out,TV-out .

This is a good one for your xp machine and you can move the mx 400 to the celery machine.

mad1 · 06-14-2002, 10:01 AM

Essential computers 64 MB,$108.00

Reselleratings

MBMASTER · 06-14-2002, 10:25 AM

YOU CAN GET THE 128 MEG VERSION FROM WWW.MARKONECOMPUTERS.COM FOR LIKE $139.50+SHIPPING
I'm sure you can find cheaper if you have the time to Shop around but this company does not jerk you on shipping and is really not a bad deal.