androp

Hi all, I want to play Oblivion on the PC. It's pretty slugish now. I'm
getting like 15-25 fps. I'm running on medium settings at 1280x720.
Here are my specs:

Athlon 2500+
Geforce 6800 128MB AGP
1GB PC3200

My question is, what will get me the most bang for the buck? My mobo
only supports AGP, and I know my proc is old, so I could get a new
Athlon 64 (x2) and get a combo AGP/PCIe board and use my existing 6800
like this one:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/...ual/page2.html

Or, I could get a better AGP card now perhaps. I'm trying to figure out
the best route to get me better visuals and performance without
breaking the bank. I don't want to spend $600 at the moment.

Thanks for your suggestions in advance.

androp

Hi all, I want to play Oblivion on the PC. It's pretty slugish now. I'm
getting like 15-25 fps. I'm running on medium settings at 1280x720.
Here are my specs:

Athlon 2500+
Geforce 6800 128MB AGP
1GB PC3200

My question is, what will get me the most bang for the buck? My mobo
only supports AGP, and I know my proc is old, so I could get a new
Athlon 64 (x2) and get a combo AGP/PCIe board and use my existing 6800
like this one:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/...ual/page2.html

Or, I could get a better AGP card now perhaps. I'm trying to figure out
the best route to get me better visuals and performance without
breaking the bank. I don't want to spend $600 at the moment.

Thanks for your suggestions in advance.

toolpackinmama

IMHO, your best value is a better vid card. Go for one with 256 MB of RAM.

nuq

That won't do any good. The video card is the main piece for gaming.

7800 GS, which is the best AGP card out now. The 7900 GS is coming
though. May already be out.

androp

Good advice about the video card. What concerns me though, is that if I
buy another AGP card, then I'll be stuck with it, not able to upgrade
my board to PCIe. Unless of course I get the combo board.

Thoughts?

clint

I had the same thoughts as you, when upgrading my system. But the reading I
did suggested getting the combo board was a bad idea. Gigabyte even warns
on their website that using the AGP slot may shorten the life-span of your
video card. May not matter too much to you, if you don't plan on using it
long anyway, but if they're giving out warnings like that, I didn't feel
real confident in their solution.

In the end, I sold my old MB and video card, and bit the bullet for a new
one. Actually, to be honest, I got rid of my entire system and re-built a
new one from scratch. I'm still using the same keyboard and mouse, and my
old HD is my backup drive in the new system, but every thing else is new.
Don't tell my wife!

BTW, the ATI cards seem to get better performance than the NVidea cards in
Oblivion (according to benchmarks). I ended up putting in a Sapphire
X1800GTO after my first replacement card (an eVGA 7600GT) couldn't handle
the heat. Seems that the 7600GT and 7900GT models have some issues, which I
didn't know about till after I got one. Thank goodness for a local shop
with a liberal return policy!

Clint

magus kent

I'm also running a Barton 2500+ and one meg for Oblivion. Had
an old TI4200 video card...didn't work too well but a kludge on
one of the boards (thanks Atomiser if I recall the name
correctly) let me play it. What I had seemed adequate to my
needs so instead of building a completely new pci-e system with
a 3700 (which is coming to the end of its lifecycle anyway) I
bought an EVGA 7800 GS AGP video card. $300.00 but I figure my
old machine is good for another year. Oblivion runs adequately
for me (not really a big graphics whore). Also running
seti@home, AV, Tauscan, etc....not shutting anything off to play
the game. Good enough for me. And when I build my new machine
I'll know what parts of the new technolgy to use and it will be
cheaper too...m

nuq

Ha! If you kept the same case, she'll never know!

nuq

I weighed the pros and cons myself a few weeks ago and went with the BFG
7800 GS I got on eBay for about $60 less than Newegg had it. Very happy
with it. Can run Oblivion at 1024x768 pretty good.

clint

I got around that by selling the old case and being up-front about that.
The rest of the guts she knows nothing about (or cares). I just told her I
was doing a few minor upgrades to make things run faster... And I was
up-front about the 20" WS LCD monitor too. A little hard to hide that one.


Clint