well films run at 24 fps, which are smooth of course, that's why anything lower than 24 fps is choppy.

General, why did you go with a Celeron D? That was budget in 2005. Where did you even manage to find one on sale and what did you pay?

I just don't get you. You can literally get a $300 PC in any computer store that kicks the **** out of any Celeron D. Yet you went out of your way to get something inferior even to the P4.

Well, we tried. It is his money. He is quite free to waste it in any way he sees fit....

Well my celeron d is dead now , the PSU blew up and my Mb got affected, so its in the trash. Thats what i get for paying 40 bucks for it, but despite the 2005 image, the rig ran fast as hell, no issues in games whatsoever.

So in about 2 weeks, i am buying a acer celeron dual core pro, thats 2008. from best buy btw, no more pawn shop computer shopping lolz

How do you know its bad? Did you try a new PSU, one greater than 90W?

I'm going to partially change my tune in that $40 isn't a terrible price for that machine.

Why did you mention the 90watts for? Thats in my P3. I don't know if you knew already, but that Celeron D was a whole different PC altogether. It was a used Dell Optiplex 210L with 220 watts , celeron D at 3.06ghz. And it was mess up already anyway, so despite the PSU blowing up , and my MB not working, before everything blew up, i kept getting crc errors, files corrupt, the whole pc was fast, but used and had problems. For the time i did use it, it was fast and gaming was cool.

So i am buying a new rig in about 2 weeks, as for now, i am back using my p3, with XP pro.

Another new PCI card, Jaton 8400GS 1GB version this time lol
http://db.jaton.com.tw/VGAProductDet...D=84558KQ-512A

Wow, the new king of wastefulness, quite a find General. $200 dollars on PCI-e can get you at least a GTX 260, which is countless times more powerful than this epic waste of money. If you are going to run something in SLI on the PCI bus, I would think it should at least be the 9400GT or better and that is a waste of time and money IMO as the PCI bus can barely handle one of those cards.

been away from this forum for a while.

My Dell Dimension 2350 which has the PCI 8500GT Sparkle card had a refit . I swapped the 2 * 512 Mb DDR 2700 memory sims for 2 * 1Gb simms, despite Dell saying this PC only supports <= 1Gb. BIOS see's 2Gb and windows sees 2Gb so that's OK. Updated nVidia to latest driver and also directX, also de-crapped and de-fragged the hard drive. Ran 3dmark and scored 5625, and that is with no O/C this time

Good to see you posting again jives11. HP says my PC can only handle 1GB of RAM but everyone else says it can take 2GB, so I have the same problem. There are lots of little things you can do to improve FPS, using a sound card helps take the load off the CPU and reducing the amount of background processes in Windows Task Manager helps improve load times as I believe you once suggested.

Curious to know if upcoming PCI cards like the 9500GT have your interest or if you are content with the 8500GT? I personally would like a 9500GT but only as a stopgap while saving for a PCI-e 2.0 rig. Still strapped financially after all this time posting about PCI cards.

Thank you Teklord. Well I guess your best bet is just to try 2Gb. If the BIOS and Windows see's it then it's OK. If it don't then you just have to sell the extra 1Gb or use it in another PC.

Your soundcard advice is interesting but .... While the soundcard will save CPU cycles it will also use IRQ's and create some PCI latency ? It's a good idea to offload work. Other ideas might be to get a better IDE controller or even look at solid state disks.
I think I'll stick with the 8500 Sparkle as the PC in question is mostly used for playing music these days by my son

You talking about shared IRQ's, if so, shared irq's are not a problem. Here is how my setup looks with my sound blaster:


Or are you talking about stuttering in sound? If so, i use to get that in windows 98. But switching over to w2k or XP pro, none of that doesn't exist anymore.

I always report new pci cards, but i have no plans to buy that jaton 8400gs 1gb. I already have a bfg 8400gs, my next pci card i plan to buy is the Albatron 8500gt or 8600gt. I know where to get them, so i will get one when i get the chance.
I am buying a new rig in the next few days, so the 8500gt or 8600gt will be a great card to use for it. I am buying either a pentium dual core, or celeron dual core, from best buy btw.

Is that bad?
How is gaming?

well when I first got the 8500 I scored 4911 (no overclock), so now I'm getting 5625 (no overclock). Possibly down to improvements in the nVidia drivers but I suspect it's more down to doubling the memory. From a gaming perspective I'll have to wait until my testing assistant has given me his verdict. However I think 3dmark is a pretty good indicator of real gaming performance. The scenarios follow classic game styles.

Yes, it will use up some of the PCI shared 133mb bandwidth, but the sound doesn't use nearly as much bandwidth as the visual data on screen does. That's why there are so many sound cards for the pci bus because it doesn't require that much bandwidth. It used to be the other way around, with the sound being the space hog and the graphics not taking as much space. I believe the CPU usage you will save will outweigh the bandwidth used by the sound card and you should notice a slight improvement in quality over the AC97 or whatever is on your PC as long as you have a half decent sound card.

I meant the video card when I said it was the king of wastefulness. I would never buy that thing and I don't know why they think anyone else would either. At least it's slightly better than the 6200x2 PCI card, so in other words your 200 dollars is noticeably less utterly wasted.

Agreed, but the most important issue imo when you consider a pci card over 100 usd is price-performance in which you'd think someone that's buying a pci card has no choice because he/she cant afford to upgrade to a pci E motherboard. For 200 dollars you can get a cheap c2d or amd cpu, ram, mobo with onboard graphics easy, if you shop enough you could get a cheapo 7 series card on ebay for 40 bucks, that would out perform a pci card with no hick ups.

QFT. I have a 7800GTX PCIe that would beat the everloving s*** out of ANY Nvidia x400 or x500 series and its only worth about 20-30 resale.

PCI is a poor fiscal investment.

Yup. Seems like AGP cards all kind of hit a level that they don't drop below though.

But this is a PCI thread, so I'll shut up now.

This is PCIe I'm talking. To UPGRADE to an AGP system at this point would make less sense than staying with PCI as far as money's concerned.

Hey this caought my interest, did you do anything special to get that extra gig of ram to run, cause i would love to have 2gb on my 2350, its my PCI gaming Machine, I have better, but this one is still nice. What BIOS revision are you running, what brand/ speed of DDR did you use? I just found a 2.4ghz Pentium 4 to replace the 2 ghz stock one, that will help some, but that extra ram will help a lot. I am running a x1550 in mine, i liked my 9250 better due to the 128bit, and easy overclocking, i wish they made a 9250 with DDR2 (just kidding) but these new PCI cards need 128bit, this 64bit business absolutely kills them more than just being PCI. I will probabely get another 9400GT 1gb, i used to have one for a friends PC, it OC'd easy, and it was good in games.

Seaner71

PS. Whoever said above never go above 1gb of Vram on PCI is wrong, the 9400GT my friend had was using all of its mem, and it actually helped alot to turn the resolution up more on games, most of the time the settings were still low to medium, but defintly playtable at 35-50FPS in most games we tried.

Hi, I didn't do anything special to get the Dimension 2350 to see 2Gb. The BIOS is the original A01, I never got around to upgrading it, and to be honest was always a bit nervous, as I had my PCI graphics as the primary. The memory I used was standard 184-pin DIMM DDR2700. My Dimension is the 2.6Ghz P4 variant