Graphic cards

[SLeeZeCoRe]

This isn't for X3 as you'll see



I'm chucking together a little PC for my 9y.o brother, I have some bits laying about, I was just wondering, is it worth adding a 64mb mem board to the 256 it already has (or will they both run at the 64's speed).

Shall I yank out the 1.8 celeron and change it for the Pentium3 even though it has less Oomph (I've used a 6 year old AMD that was faster than a Celeron )

And is a 'Hercules Terminator Beast' better than the Intel 845GL chipset graphics?



Just a simple shall I replace or just leave it as is(Emachine 370), its only gonna be used to play crap like The Sims and Runescape anyway

[gunman127]

What speed are the memory DIMMs?

Will you be using Win98SE by any chance?

256MB should be plenty for 98, and heck, it won't operate with over 512MB.

I just finished fixing my brother-in-laws £2000 Extreme Conroe system....

It was a very pricey paperweight till I got there!

[SLeeZeCoRe]

It was just originally: 256mb of mem, 1.8 celeron, 80gb drive, had XP sp2 on it. Then it went BANG so i bought a new one, but my bro is moaning so i have a new power unit for it, and just though chucking in some spare bits i have might make it more useful.

I used to run X2 ok, but theres always room for improvement, esspecially when its free

I dunno whether its Simm or Dimm, although don't all intel boards run dimm, so I should be able to just put the spare 64mb in without the 256 board being made to run slow?

And is that old Hercules GFX board better than the 845GL crapper, since I'm not savvy with old kit.

[Harlock776]

That celery will only run at 66mhz bus so a PIII or an amd equivilent is better since they run at 100mhz bus. Also your memory bus will be affected if your 256mb stick is faster than your 64mb stick. Feemachines are still living up to their name as the worst computers to buy lol. For an old feemachine like that the power supply will be extra special in size and shape and cost more to replace and harder to find.

If that 256mb stick is pc100 or pc133 and the 64mb stick is pc66 then don't use that 64mb stick it's worthless at that point. They need to be at the same speed in order to make a difference. Some older systems don't like pc133 memory and will only accept pc100 or pc66. On a system like that with only 256mb ram, xp boot up time will be unbearable. Old SDRAM is hard to find and it ain't cheap expecially higher density pc100 memory since they don't make it much or at all anymore.

Bottom line, use it while you can but if you get your hands on $350.00 just go buy a new pc or even a more recent used pc would be better than an old PIII.

[pjknibbs]

A 1.8GHz Celeron runs at 100MHz FSB--it's based on a Pentium 4; you're thinking of the old Pentium 3 based Celeron.

[BugMeister]

I've just jacked up my youngest son and daughter's Celeron-based system with 1024mb PC3200 RAM, a 6600GT(256) graphics card and a CMEDIA 8738 sound-card, and it's running beautifully via a 17in Relysis CRT monitor..

..but that may just be luck (- crossed fingers..!!)

[SLeeZeCoRe]

The power unit is bog standard, I tried one from a 9 year old terminal PC and it worked but had no connectors for the slave drive, but I got another one anyway so thats cool.

The 256mb board in it already is SDRAM DDR2! The whole machine is only aboput 3 or 4 years old.

And XP takes all of 4 seconds to load or did before it had McAfee on it then ice ages came and went before you could get online.




So anyway, thats a no to adding the extra 64mb, but what about the graphics card, the integreted one came run X2 ok, but is the Hercules Terminator Beast one (I've never even heard of before lol) better ?

[The_Abyss]

The Hercules Card from Google is based on Savage's S3 graphics chip (I found a review from 2001) which is pretty much all you need to know. The integrated Intel solution will be better, however in gaming terms it's like asking to choose between a broken leg or 2 broken arms - you aren't going to be able to do much with either.

If you want people's opinions or help, its a good idea to at least make a small effort yourself first and actually find out something about the components you are talking about.

[SLeeZeCoRe]

Yeah I looked and only found reviews that said it was 'good' which is why I asked people that actually have some clue to using them and one mans honey is another mans turd. Ie: I have integrated graphics (Radeon Xpress 200) on my PC but everyone has told me its crap, but mine runs things better than the equivalents in the same price range.

I was asking for experience is all, don't bite my nuts off

[Harlock776]

OMG LOL!!!!




When you said pentium3 I assumed you were dealing with older stuff. Never use S3 graphics they are horrible, I know this from experience. Also their drivers never work quite right and rarely get updated. A good time to buy an agp video card was right before the geforce FX5700 series permenantly downgraded to the LE version. I used to own an albatron FX5700... plain ol FX5700 no LE or GT or anything else and it ran X2 just fine. Now you can't find anything else besides the LE and it's price is just annoying. If you stay with the onboard graphics then try to get some more memory than 64mb since the onboard video does strain the system even if it's only set to use 64mb. Get rid of that mcaffee mess and get yourself some NOD32 it's way better and doesn't bog down the system like norton or mcaffee does.

Oh also stay away from any google software except google earth which is interesting but that google toolbar and desktop and whatever else it is that gets piled onto IE7 will seriously increase your startup time to like 5 mins lol. I've been getting calls from people in the last few weeks telling me their system got real slow after they updated to IE7 and sure enough that google mess was on there. Soon as I walked them through how to remove it, the delays were gone.

[Constipated_Vigilante]

An extra 64mb on top of 256 won't make a real difference, and the decrease in speed would probably be worse (as it WOULD underclock to the 64's speed). What's the speed of the Pentium 3 (because a 1.8ghz Pentium 3 is faster than a 1.8ghz P4)? And I'm not familiar with Hercules cards.

[SLeeZeCoRe]

I thought the 256 board would go slower, just needed confirmation.

Sod the Herc card too then lol.

I just keep it the way it is then (new power unit though), it ain't gret but adequate for what my little bro will use it for, he can wait till the christmas/new years cash slump is gone and I'm might get him some Memory.

If the Celeron got toasted when it went bang though, then I guess theres no choice but to put the P3.


Cheers all, but now, shall I rid it of Windows and put Unix on it WINE software should make it run Windows games, non?