question about upgrading...

[BioMechanoid75]

here are my current system specs:

Falcon Northwest
Athlon T-Bird 800 Mhz
Asus A7V Mobo
128 MB Crucial PC133 RAM
Annihilator 2 GeForce 2 GTS 32 MB video card
Soundblaster Live! Value soundcard
Pioneer 16x DVD-ROM
30 GB 7200RPM hard drive (i forget who the manufacturer is)

anyway, i've noticed the quite a few of my recent games run like crap on the system. i don't know what the problem is, but some games (namely Alice, which runs at about 5 fps, and Undying, which refuses to run at anything higher than 800x600 and even then is still relatively choppy) are pretty much unplayable. Then there's Diablo 2 which runs at a pretty consistent 10-16 fps, unless i go to the pause/menu screen in which case it bumps up to over 100+ fps.

what i'm intending to do in the very near future is double the RAM and purchase a GeForce 3 card. could someone tell me if these upgrades will result in a substantial improvement? i'd really like to play Max Payne, but i hate to think how it would run on my machine. will the power of the GeForce 3 be bottlenecked by my 800 Mhz processor, or should it still run significantly better than my geforce 2? i plan to upgrade my processor sometime soon as well, but first i'd like to increase the RAM and get a nice video card. upon reading this post, it seems like this is sort of an unanswerable question, but if someone could help or give me any input at all, i would much appreciate it. thanks.

[mush]

I dont know much about your setup... but i have the exact same Graphics Card (Creative Geforce GTS 32MB DDR), with my AMD 1.2Ghz. And I must say I am very please with its performance... Alice as a matter of fact ran silky smooth at 1024x768 @ 32bit - not a single slowdown. If i was you i wouldn't invest in a Graphics Card - Not just yet anyway.

Like i said i cant say much about your setup, but here are a couple of usual suggestions... get all the latest motherboard drivers, the AGP drivers, the Graphics Card drivers etc. And also try to overclock your CPU - it should atleast 1Ghz easily, and with that you should see a substancial improvement in Games as in general.

Hope This Helps,
Mush.

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• AMD 1.2Ghz @ 1.33Ghz (133x10)
  (49C idle - 51C full load)
• Taisol 760 (6800rpm Delta Fan)
• ASUS A7V133 Motherboard
• Crucial PC133 SDRAM
• IBM 60GXP 40.2GB (UDMA 100)
• GeForce 2 GTS (32MB DDR)
• SB Live! 5.1 (PCi)
• Creative SoundWorks (Digital)
• Pioneer 106 DVD
• Rioch 8x8x32 CD-RW
• GlobalWin 802 Case (2x80mm Fans)
• 300 Watt Macron PSU
• 19" iLyama Display (.26)
• 3DMark 2001 Score = 3668

[Raptor2150]

That's definitely odd... I can still play Alice and Undying on my tnt2 ultra