Shall I upgrade my graphics card?

[ajezard]

ok, so here are my specs:
NVIDIA GeForce 6100 (GeForce 6100)
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3700+
958 MB Ram (should be 1GB)
Realtek AC97 Audio

Now, because the geforce 6100 is onboard its makes games lag, sometimes even on the lowest settings. So I was thinking of upgrading my graphics card to a dedicated card.
But im not sure witch to get, I've got a low budget of £60 and dont care if its from eBay (usually cheaper on there).

Edit: I also prefer nVidia

 

[Asus]

Yes, upgrade from the onboard 6100!
Check out the 9600GT.

The numbers 9500 and 9600 are right next to each other BUT THEY ARE NOT SIMILAR.
The 9500GT is a slower budget card for 3d games. The 9600GT is a fast card just a step down from the 9800gt.

9600GT vs 8600 GT performance numbers.
(The older 8600 GT and 9500 GT are similar. The 9500 does slightly better.)

ALTHOUGH
The ATI 4830 is similar or faster than the 9600GT/9800GT.
4830 price.

In the past ATI has gained more FPS than Nvidia by switching from a slower to a fast CPU. ATI's 4830 may not have the same advantage over Nvidia's cards that they do in the benchmarks above on your Athlon 64 3700+. I'm not sure.

 

[kazsymonds]

Yeah, what asus said.

BTW what games are you playing as that's a low spec for a calculator!

 

[ajezard]

well, when i built the pc, witch was about 2 years ago, it ran most games fine, and I mainly play half life 2 on it getting around 50fps on highest settings. But the other day i bought lego batman and the new prince of persia, lego batman would only run at the lowest settings without lag and PoP, even on the lowest settings lagged...lots. i figured it was the graphics card slowing it down
so i decided to upgrade. I think ill go for the 9600GT

 

[Dinnesch]

Don't do it. I've done the same with my old PC(Athlon 2800, 1.25GB) by buying a Radeon X1650 AGP for it. I expected games to run like I've seen on YT videos from people with a X1650.

But Crysis only ran at Medium settings, because it was bottlenecked by my CPU. Other games like Far Cry 2 and Assasin's Creed didn't even start because my CPU lacked some required instructions.
To take advantage of a upgrade, you'll also have to put another gb of RAM and a new CPU in your PC(to run modern games).

Seriously, just start collecting money for a whole new PC/full upgrade, instead of buying 'old' hardware which will probably allow you to play 1 or 2 cool games which you can't play now and will disappoint you when the next good game arrives.

 

[Asus]

If he was talking about going from a mid range card to a high end I would completely agree since there would a major bottleneck (CPU/Ram what you listed). But he's talking about shit onboard video. The newer games are making his low end chip bog down since they probably use more shaders. His CPU (even though it may not be up to speed) is actually waiting for his slow GPU to finish the more intense shader work on these new games before moving on. A new GPU with more powerful shader power should eliminate his problem.

Some benchmarks on different CPU with similar settings.
First lets look at the 6100. Well, Tom's didn't have the 6100 in their benchmarks so the 6200 is the closest thing. Both use the same NV44 core but the 6100 has only 2 pixel pipelines while the 6200 has 4.

In HL2 @ 1280x1024 w/ AA and AF the 6200 only gets 6 FPS average. (Keep scrolling. It's the last one.)

Now in Firingsquads reviews they sometimes do a couple GPUs over a CPU line to compare for upgrading. Here ya have the 8800's (8800GTS is similar to the 9600GT) with Athlon 64 X2's. Now HL2 did not use more than 2 cores back then (and now you have to manually enable it for multithreading) so you can compare the 2.4GHz X2 (4600+) with your A64 3700+ (2.4GHz) fairly closely. You can see here the 4000+ and X2 4800+ doing similarly in HL2. Both are 2.4GHz w/1MB L2 cache. One is single core and the other is dual.
All the 8800GTS's with A64's there get high FPS compared to the 6200 in the other charts.

Yes, he does only have 1GB of ram. But Lego Batman shouldn't push his memory limits. Not unless he was playing BF2 (large landscape) would 2GB ram improve his FPS much.

 

[ajezard]

Ok, so I'll take your advice and do a full pc upgrade.
Im thinking of upgrading to NVIDIA GeForce 9800, 2Gb of ram and I dont know if I shall upgrade my processor, its a AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3700+ (2.21Ghz clocked to 3.7Ghz).

 

[Asus]

Is it a socket 754? You can't upgrade any farther.
Is it socket 939? They don't sell new CPUs for that socket. Have to buy used most likely.

Upgrading the CPU probably means buying a new board as well.
Check out Socket 775 with Intel Core 2 Duos/Quads.
Or Socket AM2+/AM3 with AMD Phenom 2's (not the original Phenoms).