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Would x1950pro & 2500+ be too CPU bound?

Associate
Joined
23 Aug 2007
Posts
14
Hi,

I'm unsure whether there's any point in upgrading to an x1950pro card when I've got a 2500+ Barton CPU? Does anyone know if this is sensible or should I just go for an x850 or similar if the x1950 would be too CPU bound? I'm hoping to postpone the jump to PCIe for another 9 months so I've been looking to upgrade my Radeon 9800 AGP card hence the question.
 
Associate
Joined
6 Oct 2005
Posts
135
Yes it would be. I had an A64 3700, and it was limiting the X1950Pro. I upgraded to P35 / C2D E2180 @ 3.2 ghz / 2gb 800 DDR2 ram (for £175 total), and the improvement in framerates was very nice indeed!

I had a 2500 XP before, and that was well suited to my old AGP X800XT-PE.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
3 Apr 2003
Posts
15,618
Location
Cambridge
Nevermind that... head for 2.6GHz. At that speed, you'd give even Athlon 64 3700's a good scare.

At the original poster:

You have to remember that a lot of gaming performance depends on the CPU's ability to through wire-frames around the 'screen'. As games become more detailed polygon-wise, our XPs become increasingly strained. I went from a 9800Pro to an X800XT-PE and noticed a 2fps difference in X3... going from minimum details to maximum + IQ all turned on. Overclocking the Barton to 2.4GHz gave me a 10fps boost...
 
Associate
OP
Joined
23 Aug 2007
Posts
14
Thanks for that. I did try looking around the web for a list of graphics cards and the min recommended CPU to go with them but couldn't find one (guessing that there's too many variables to give an accurate picture). I'll see if I can dig out a decent x800 - x850 then.
 
Soldato
Joined
30 Jul 2005
Posts
19,361
Location
Midlands
would advise against any newer ati agp cards, the x1950pro and hd agp series cards are stuck on broken drivers so will have to use drivers version 7.7 to work properly. and the cards then miss out on much needed fixes for newer games.
also x1950pro agp video acceleration is broken too for wmvhd and x264.
 
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