George MC Posted April 4, 2008 Share Posted April 4, 2008 I'm looking for some advice please I'm running an ASUS P4S800 Motherboard, with a Intel® Pentium® 4 CPU 3.00GHz, 2Gb RAM and my graphics card is a BFG NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS 256Mb (AGP). What I am after is to see whether there are any grpahics card updates worth doing that will run CMSF and CMx1. Ideally I am looking to not have to upgrade my MB and processor. Any advice would be useful and appreciated. Cheers fur noo George ps OP System Windows XP SP2 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzman Posted April 4, 2008 Share Posted April 4, 2008 The best AGP card available, and the only one from the current generation of cards, is the ATI Radeon HD 3850 with 512MB. From Nvidia, 79xx card, as none of the 8xxx series is available in AGP format. Thing is the best AGP card is going to cost you more than the current 8800GT! Honestly, its not worth putting money into a system like that, your better off saving your money for a LGA 775 based system with a low cost Core 2 Duo, even a Pentium Dual Core (not a P4 based chip, rather based on the C2D) would blow that out of the water. [ April 04, 2008, 06:27 AM: Message edited by: Pzman ] 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
George MC Posted April 4, 2008 Author Share Posted April 4, 2008 Hi Pzman Many thanks. I take your point about a new system. At the moment and for a while I won't be in the market for any new rig, so I'll need to have my old rig just trundle along. I do plan though for next year to do a total upgrade but that's a year away and I'm keen on upping the size of CMSF maps but I need a card that can handle all that. I'll check out costs for that card but from what I see that's my best short term option. Next year new rig! Thanks again for your help. Cheers fur noo George 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzman Posted April 4, 2008 Share Posted April 4, 2008 Yeah, in that case, I would try and find a card with 512MB VRAM. For larger maps its going to be the VRAM that makes the big difference. Maybe even a 7800GT with more memory would be better, problem will be finding one. Even on eBay its hard to get your hands on anything other than 7200s or 7600s. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Der Alte Fritz Posted April 6, 2008 Share Posted April 6, 2008 Hi George. Stay away from the ATI cards as the 2000 and 3000 series do NOT play CMX1 without a really annoying text bug that has not been solved yet. I sent my new Dell back on the strength of it. So looking at the NVIDIA cards, you have a number of options: 1) 7600GS 512Mb VRAM which you can get for around £95 2) 7600GT 512Mb VRAM on eBay for around £50 3) 7800GS 512Mb VRAM on eBay for £75 4) 7950GT 512Mb VRAM which is around £150 5) Would your rig take a second 7800GS and then link them with SLI? All these options are AGP sockets. If it were me, I would go for option 3 (and there are six available now on ebay under Gainward 7800GS+ Golden Sample. If you want an excellent powerful reliable card and have the money then option 4 would be best. My new card is essentially the 256 version and it is very fast even with CMSF. But the decision is whether it is worth it for a year and inevitably your new rig will not take the AGP cards. But again you might still be able to sell it back on ebay to recoup some of your money. As a comparison, I had a look on www.pcspecialist.co.uk to see what the costs of a new rig which will run CMBB and CMSF and it came out at £618. That was for AMD 64 3.2 Hz, 2 Gb RAM, motherboard ASUS M3A, 400Gb HD, SoundBlaster sound card and a 1024MB GEFORCE 8800GT PCI Express + DVI + TV-OUT graphics card. You need to fit Windows XP in order to run CMX1 games with the 8800 card. I think Windows XP 64bit will run 4Gb RAM but the cost difference would be not be too much. It might be better to upgrade you existing machine as far as it will go for CMBB and then wait a year and get a really fast machine to run CMSF? cheers 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzman Posted April 6, 2008 Share Posted April 6, 2008 Originally posted by Der Alte Fritz: ...motherboard ASUS M3A... Stay away from that board, or any ASUS board that under $120! I bought one in February, lots of bugs, although they are slowly being dealt with via BIOS updates. The problems were solved when my PSU died and killed it. The board was replaced by the shop for free, but I just had too many issues with the board freezing on boot to recommend it to anyone. I thus moved to an DFI MBO, Intel system, and I am a lot more satisfied. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Der Alte Fritz Posted April 7, 2008 Share Posted April 7, 2008 Hi I have had no problems with this motherboard and the whole machine has run as smooth as silk since the day I got it March. Unlike the Dell machine which required numerous updates and two BIOS updates just to stop the damn fan sounding like a 747 taking off! The video card never worked correctly and the amount of bloatware was huge. I have never had a computer delivered before which did not actually work out of the box. Have given up on Dell and now use these guys up in Yorkshire who have built a well balanced machine, delivered it on time and I never once had to call India to fix a problem! cheers 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pzman Posted April 7, 2008 Share Posted April 7, 2008 Yeah, word is that the M3A has some issue with a number of Nvidia graphics cards, so that may have been my problem. 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
George MC Posted April 10, 2008 Author Share Posted April 10, 2008 Hi Guys Many thanks for the advice. I'm looking at a 7950GT 512Mb on Ebay, so see if I get that. Using another 7800 card linked in SLI is a no-go as I only have one AGP slot. Thanks again guys Cheers fur noo George 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Schrullenhaft Posted April 10, 2008 Share Posted April 10, 2008 George - I'm only aware of one GeForce 7950 that was released for the AGP bus and it was made by XFX. The vast majority of 7950's were PCI-Express (PCIe). Unfortunately the XFX 7950GT for AGP had a pretty high failure rate, with a number of users getting blue tinted screens (among other problems). You may want to find out what sort of warranty you'll have since there is a significant chance you may need to use it. There's also the issue of driver support. Since so few of the 7950's were made as AGP cards, Nvidia didn't support them initially and you have to get the custom drivers from XFX. I'm not sure if later drivers from Nvidia supported the AGP 7950's (I assume so, but I'm not sure). 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Redwolf Posted April 10, 2008 Share Posted April 10, 2008 All 79xx NVidia cards had very high failure rates. The worst series they ever put out (and it didn't only affect factory overclocked cards like some claim). That Netburst CPU with probably DDR1 RAM also can't feed a card like that (unless you run 3824x2196 or somefink). 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
George MC Posted April 11, 2008 Author Share Posted April 11, 2008 Roger that - I've only put in a small bid for the card and the seller accepts returns. I'll see how it goes. Looking increasingly like a whole rig upgrade Cheers fur noo George 0 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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