GF4Ti4200 or a DDR motherboard

[john240sx]

i'm about to upgrade, again.
i'm thinking about either upgrading my MX400 to a GF4Ti4200 or upgrade my motherboard from PC133 (gag) to a DDR motherboard.

if i upgrade the video i'll get a GAINWARD/CARDEXPERT GeForce 4 Ti 4200, 4ns, 128MB DDR, Power Pack Golden Sample for $165
the motherboard i'm not sure what to get, there's so many good ones.

what do you think would give me better performance in games? my rig is in the sig :D

[Penguin4x4]

ABIT KX7-333/KX7-333R or AT7 MAX

[Intrepid]

THe RAM would up general preformance a bit!! but the vid card would up vid performance way more than jsut going DDR

tho for me the DDR would be better casu I want godo overall preformance.

[Penguin4x4]

Get the motherboard, buy the video card when you have saved up enough funds, then sell your current video card for $40-$60. Unless you're a hardcore gamer, then its the other way around.

[Causality]

I am in an almost identical situation. I decided to spend my money on the ddr board (an asus p4s533) since I desperately need one. (Using pc133 like you right now!)

I figure that graphics cards seem to improve every month, much faster than most other computer hardware. I will probably wait until my eyes start crossing from poor frame-rate before I get a new card. (Using a pci mx400) That is a great price on the card though, hmmm... *Must resist buying a new graphics card too!*

[Intrepid]

What I do is set goals based on equiopment on the market when i set up my plan, set up a money plan and stick to it. By the time I get the stuf it's not top of the line, but close to it and much cheeper. and i stick to the plan unles i spacifily say i am puting in a device that is out now in lew of something thats not out yet. becaue I NEVER plan to get something thats not out on the shelf. NEVER wait for the next best tihnng in computers, it'll kill you!

[john240sx]

my problem is that when i origanally built this box it was pretty well balanced.
750Mhz Duron (now a XP1600 AGOIA-Y)
256MB ram generic (now 256MB samsung PC133)
Visiontek GF2MX400
20GIG WD hard drive (now dual 40GIG WD 7200 RAM)

this stuff worked great together, then i overclocked it (big mistake) now i can't stop upgrading. i noticed when i ran the FSB really high the video performance was alot better then overclocking the video card, that's what made me think about DDR.
but, a GF4Ti4200 would destroy this puny MX400. i just don't want to create a major bottle neck and waste money right now.
i know that if i wait everything will be cheaper but how far can you let that go. kinda like "for just a few more dollars i can get..."

it's going to be about the same price for the card and the MB and ram. tough decision.
well, thanks for the reply's but it didn't make this any easier :( . why is upgrading so hard? lol

[roYal]

i would definitely get the mobo with ddr support instead of the video card. Then from there, save up for the video card.

[Cisco Kid]

mobo for sure video later

cisco kid

[lcx700m]

go for the video card because the card will last a t least two years.

[Yodums]

Originally posted by lcx700m
go for the video card because the card will last a t least two years.

Your sig is too long, you must edit it to meet the standards of this post: http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=58341

The video card may last, but it won't benefit anything with a crippled motherboard. Go with the motherboard + DDR upgrade. Not only will DDR boost the performance, the board will too. The heart of any system is the motherboard, without the motherboard any other upgrade is pointless as your performance will be crippled!

Go for the mobo now, video can wait. the MX400 can play most games just not at a very high resolution w/ detail.

Yodums

[Titan386]

Go for the mobo. If I were you, I'd wait a little while for nForce2 to come out, and lower the prices of the existing boards. Then, pick up a board for cheap. I've been very happy with the Asus A7V333, overclocks nicely and has lots of features. The only problem is its price, $131 at newegg. Wait a few weeks until nForce2 comes out, and that should change.

The reason I suggest the mobo over the vid card is that the performance of everything will be boosted by it. The video card, however, will only help in 3d intensive apps. Most of these apps also like to use RAM, so the older pc133 won't help there, and will become a huge bottleneck.

[Darth]

Not sure but i think Nvidia will lower their prices for their TI cards in september because thats when ATI's Radeon 9700 will come out. Since Nvidia doesnt have any way to combat the 9700 till november, they will have to lower prices. If this is right then you should get the mobo now, and wait till september to get a GF4Ti4200.

[Intrepid]

Go for the mobo, that would be best if ou ask me. THe mobo id your base plat form from which you build the system in my opinion, so upgrading it wil lgive you a greater veriety of new options all around.

[eletrium]

I'd like to put in my 2 cents. :D

The biggest bottleneck in video rendering isn't in the rendering at all. You card could be rendered by a cray, and it still would be hitting a max threshold. This is because the video card renders the image on its on board RAM, then it needs to transfer it through the bus (imagine watermelon through a pinhole) into the Main memory segment that Windows uses to "paint" the screen. ie send it to the monitor.

Not exactly, but sorta. Moving data is by far the biggest problem with programming. Calculating it is secondary.

That said, nVidia, smart as they are, figured out a way to handle this with the XBox my mapping the segment of memory needed to render the image into a buffer in main memory that gets switched out. Essentially the flowers on a table pulling a table cloth thingie. (Microsoft gave them millions do do a nice driver for their system, which is Windows2000 with a facemask on it).

Their nForce line of mobos have been developed with this in mind. They have a nice GeForce2MX chip onboard in some cases and share main memory. This essentially eliminates the need to pump data through the bus. The program running the physics engine (DX8) can run its calcs in the same memory pool as the one that needs to render. Mass data transfer not needed. Mass performance without massive chips to churn data are needed.

Drivers to support this technology should be forthcoming, probably around the release of their nForce2 mobos (with an even better GeForce4MX (I think) graphics chip onboard.

I would wait to see if this technology gets transferred into the next generation of mobos from nVidia. You can probably get BOTH the great DDR chipset and the kicka-- videa card.

By the way, if you get an nForce mobo, because it has dual bus architecture, make sure you fill EVERY BANK of ddr up, even if you have to fill it out with sticks of 2100 128.

[Dreamkiller]

I would get a nice DDR board first. Unless u really really really want to sacrifice loading speeds to play Warcraft 3 on everything high on 32-bit color :D

[john240sx]

so going by what most of you people say, i should get the DDR motherboard first then try to get the video card.
thanks for the replys.

[AMD900]

i went from sd (386) to ddr (256 pc2100) and my scores doubled

[John Jr]

I agree with the majority dude, get a faster performing motherboard and video later on. Video will change and what is good now will be cheaper later and still good. Alot of people still use G-force 2 cards even thou the G-force 4 cards are out.

[Dios67]

My 2 cents...... I would buy the video and the mb..... you can really resonably prices ddr 266 boards (there is very little real world performance difference between the 333 and 266 currently)... and then i would get a gf3 ti 500.... huge jump from your gf2mx and the gf3 ti 500 is just a little slower than gf4 ti 2000.

in short..... get both...... heheh