" m
wrote in message ...
Hello,

I apologize in advance if this question has been asked before. I asked my
friend who works for a computer shop for a GF4Ti card but he passed me a
Asus V9520 Magic FX5200 - DDR 128MB card - US$80.

I have a PIII 850, Asus motherboard, 512MB RAM, SBLive sound card and a
GeForce2MX 32mb card, Windows 2000Pro - latest drivers etc. Its a stable
system and I don't have any significant problems. It plays some of the
latest games like Mechwarrior 4 quite OK. Having a bit of problems playing
Unreal2 though.

I don't want to buy a whole new system just yet. So I thought of upgrading
my grapics card.

Before I go and exchange my card, what would be the best card for my
system?

ATI 9500 128 meg softmodded to 9700...still you're CPU-bound at any rate
(not with that MX ;-) ) If you're stuck on Nvidia (some people are), the GF4
might be a better choice. The FX 5200 is actually slower in many instances
(it's really just a GF4 MX replacement), the only things it brings to the
table is DX9 and marginally better 3dMark 03 scores (at the expense of
lossless color and Z-compression, BTW the AA and aniso performance fall
miserably flat compared to the ATI card). Whoopee. That Asus mobo might be
able to be upgraded to a Tualatin Celeron 1.1. So far every one of them I've
seen will run @ 133 MHz FSB, and they make great upgrades for many old Slot
One and non-Tualatin mobos with a cheap adaptor from
www.strattoncomputer.com . I can vouch for the Slot T. I've gone thru a few
of them. One was in a Dell Dimension XPS R400 (Intel BX board), which is now
a R1400...total parts cost $70 for the Celly 1400 retail and Slot T. BIOS
ID's it as a PPro 500, OS ID's it correctly, and it works fine. If you have
a Socket 370 mobo that is not Tualatin compatible, there is a socket adaptor
as well. As always, make sure your mobo is on the compatibility list if this
is the path you choose to take, and you might need a BIOS flash to ensure
full compatibility. It will likely extend the usable lifespan of your Asus
mobo for another year or so, memory bandwidth bottleneck notwithstanding. I
have a later revision P2B-F/Slot T/1.1 Celly at 1460 with a GF3 and a $30
Highpoint Rocket 133 dual-channel IDE controller on the LAN here. Works
great...with multiple OSes no less...worked with a GF4, too before it got
swapped into another box.