I want to know which machine would be faster for gaming?

A 1 year old 2.5 ghz celron with a PCI Geforce 2(4000mx) w/64mb ram, and 378mb system ram at 266mhz bus speed.

or a

4 year old dell P3 866mhz with a AGP Geforce 5200 w/128mb ram, and 512mb system ram at 133mhz bus speed. The geforce 5200 will be at 4X.
THe 5200 has support for Opengl 1.5.

Will the 866 kick ***?

The first games I will try on it are Knights of the Old Republic 2 and 1.

Take the RAM and AGP card out of the Dell and stick them in the Celeron PC, (if they fit and are compatible).
My guess would be that the celeron beats the P3 (in their current status).

I would probley go with the celeron.

I wish.

The celron 2.3 ghz has only PCI. I can however buy a pci geforce 5200 for it for $60.

Or should I buy a AGP 5200 for $35 and replace the mobo with a $30 mobo with a AGP slot. Lots of work to rebuild. Will the AGP be worth it? AGP cards are cheaper now than PCI. Are there any features different between the same cards (Geforce 5200) for AGP and PCI? The specs show the same for both versions. I know AGP is faster, but will it matter much for a medium perf. card like this for the stuff out this year. It is a fast card for now. Not worried about a year from now because I am about maximum performance based on price. I usually buy a decent system every year, so I am not looking for something to last more than that. Most bang for the buck, and depreciation for that matter. I would rather take the money my computer depreciates in the next year and just put it towards a new system. Problem is I already just built that one and I could use another one. lol.......... The celeron is that one from a year ago. Now however, I am into building them myself.

Thanks for all the info so far.

What company is your celeron computer from anyways because if it is an emachine and you are looking to change the motherboard then you will have to replace Windows XP as well. I will give you the details on what you need to do if it is an emachine based computer.

You can get more high end cards on AGP than PCI as for performance difference there really isnt much difference in performance maybe 3 or 4 FPS its a lil more when running on higher resolutions. You could stick with PCI if you like since that card will not be able to handle games at resolutions higher than 1024*768 anyways.

If i were you i would just spend the extra money on a decent system and have it last you more than two years this way you can play games running on decent frame rates with a lil bit of eye candy rather than buy an entry level system with an entry level graphics card and having to replace it every year. Just a friendly suggestion but its your money and spend it as you see fit. Hope the information above helped.

Oh and as for your original question the celeron would beat the pentium 3 because the celerons are really the older pentium 4 versions with lower cache and in some cases front side bus.

I think it would be more economical to save your bucks up for a while longer, and then go the whole hog.
nVidia4 chip motherboard, with AMD64 socket-939.
Look at the selection from MSI. Boards with AGPx8 are relatively cheap and that's what you should get if you are not a gamer. The (expensive) PCI-Express is supposed to be the way forward, but really only for graphics cards (sofar). The rest of the stuff is built-in in most mobos anyway.
If you buy an AMD64-3000 90nm now, in a year or two, you can upgrade (only the CPU) to a dual core CPU and only need a BIOS-upgrade. Get 512MB(2x256) or 1GB(2x512) PC3200/DDR400 memory.

Agreed with above!!! :bounce:

Thanks for the info guys. I run some descent games, but they are usually RPG, and a few steps behind the higher end gaming stuff. I was gonna just by the PCI, but then of course I just saw this Mobo for $10 on tiger. If it doesnt fit my case there was a case for $10 too. But then of course there is the shipping. Geezh....

I love getting descent stuff cheap. This celron thing cost me $200 dollars over a year ago, so the money I saved then is going to be used now. I put a geforce 400mx (g2) in it a year ago as a upgrade, but made the mistake of buying it in a retail store. Also I didn't have the nerve to build a system then.

Sounds like the pci video upgrade is the thing to do for my medium performance req gaming stuff. I still might go the mobo route, just so that the card is AGP and more usable in my future builds. Same money either route.

Thx guys.