Best AGP card for an old AMD Athlon xp2800 333mhz cpu based system

[Loose Cannon]

Hi
Yes, this is yet another person looking for best fps from an old system.
I can play lfs okay but want to try and stop the jerky screens when other cars around. Particularly bad at first corner and start. Have tried turning down settings but not much help. I know I can upgrade the graphics card but am I wasting my time if the CPU might be causing a bottle neck? I have read in other threads that lfs puts more demands on your CPU than the graphics card.
Was thinking along the lines of ATI 9800 Pro, Radeon HD3850, 7600GT? A friend used to have the same mainboard and a 6600GT was a tight fit in the available space so wouldnt want anything physically bigger.
Any thoughts guys?

specs
MSI KT6 Delta MS-6950v2.x ATX mainboard
AMD Athlon xp2800 cpu 333mhz
3 x 1 GB ram DDR333
AGP 8X
Leadtek Winfast A310 Graphics Card 256mb VIVO

[shiny_red_cobra]

Any upgrade you make will not give you a significant boost to fps. I highly recommend you save your money and buy a completely new system. I've wasted too much money on upgrades which didn't improve my system too much, so I've learned not to upgrade old systems.

That said, if you're really bent on upgrading, the only thing you can really upgrade is the video card. The CPU is almost maxed out on that motherboard (I believe the highest Socket A CPU available is the Athlon XP 3200, so not a significant upgrade there). The only thing worth upgrading is your video card. The ONLY AGP video cards worth getting are Radeon 3850 AGP or Radeon 4670 AGP, and luckily they're very cheap these days. I say upgrade your video card if you have the money to spare. You should notice an improvement (not a big one, but the game should be smoother overall). Btw whether the video card fits in your system depends on the size of your case, not the motherboard, so make sure there's space in your case to fit it.

[Loose Cannon]

Thanks shiny-red-cobra
About what I expected really, will have to start looking for a better system. Only getting 10-20 fps able to get 40-50 with everything turned off apart from when full grid in first corner. Think the cpu is going to prevent a HD3850 from giving me a big boost.
Have a G25 wheel on order for christmas so need to upgrade asap. Need to investigate new system specs now to find a good gaming setup for LFS. Any suggestions on minimum specs to look for? I only ever look at specs seriously every few years and it takes a while to get up to date with the new specs available.

[shiny_red_cobra]

Pretty much any new components are able to run LFS smoothly. If you want a higher end system, you will need the following: a quad-core CPU (Intel Core i5 or AMD Phenom II X4 is sufficient), and a good video card (an ATI Radeon 5800 series card, in fact even the 4800s are still very good and are dirt cheap nowadays). Other than that, a decent ASUS motherboard will do, and some amount of DDR3 RAM. The amount is up to you, anything around 4GB should do fine for pretty much anything.

That's pretty much what I would get if I was to buy a new computer.

[shaun463]

XP2800s weren't 333mHz.

[shiny_red_cobra]

The FSB was 333 MHz kid, actual clock speed is 2.25 GHz.

[Shadowww]

Originally Posted by shiny_red_cobra

kid

Your attitude makes you more kiddish than him even though you are much older than him.

[shiny_red_cobra]

Umm no. When you post in a thread like he did and don't really offer anything useful to it, just trying to undermine something, then I consider that to be very childish, and I'm gonna point it out. Thanks.

[Bluebird B B]

On response top original question,
you can als get a ati 4650 card, but you might be very cpu limited. two months ago i gave away a lot faster system to friends for nothing...3500+, low latency ddr2 400Mhz with proper dual channel, 4x512mb.

So if you upgrade try also to get bot channels working/balanced. It will require an extra 1gbyte dimm or the removal of 1gbyte dimm.


But what ever you do, it is very costly to make an old system perform like current systems. Better to start saving money and do a major upgrade. If lfs is all that matters... a complete system can be built that will cost about €600 which will be able to run lfs with all settings maxed out with 32 racers in view.

[Trader2005]

ATI 3850 agp is the way to go if you do not want to upgrade. I have Frankenstein board, Asrock 775i65g, low-latency 2.0 DDR 400, with Q6700 quad core. Max framerates w/o vsync or frame limiter is approx. 150 with GPU maxed out. Vsync and frame limiter for 60 Hz LCD monitor and GPU lopes along at approx. 60% or less.

[Trader2005]

Those figures include AA and AF maxed out.