You're really going to have to increase your budget if you want to play Battlefield2. It's much too modern a game to squeek by with an upgrade to that older system.

You CAN build decent Socket A performing game PC's, but your mainboard is limited to 200/266 Socket A processors. Good luck finding one of these! If your mainboard had 333/400 support, I'd say just plop a 2800+ Barton, 1 gig of ram and a cheapo AGP card and you'd be good to go. Unfortunately, 200/266 Socket A's are pretty much obsolete and underperforming for better games.

You can still scavenge many of your old parts towards a new system though, such as dvd, hard drive, floppy, monitor, keyboard, etc.etc. and do so economically. If you go all the way to a PCI-Express or a budget AGP system is the question.

You can have the parts to assemble a 1gig, ddr2-800, AMD's new AM2 socket Athlon 3000+, SLI PCI-Express motherboard, Radeon X1600 Pro 256mb in a nice Antec black case with 450W power supply for under $500. From there, you just snap in your hd, drives and format/re-install Windows.

 

A couple of NewEgg parts lists:

Generic psu/mainboard, lowest budget AM2 gaming system, Sempron 3000+ - $341
http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/wishlist/PublicWishDetail.asp?WishListNumber=3407728

All name brand parts, mainboard, case, AM2 Athlon 3000+ etc.etc. - $498
http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/wishlist/PublicWishDetail.asp?WishListNumber=3546986

 

I hear you -
i guess i'm more thinking along the lines of :

an AMD xp 2400+ chip $50 ebay
512 or 768 meg extra memory $50 somewhere?
video card - i like nvidias $__ somewhere? help! which card!

you see - the AMD xp1700 512meg ti4600 comp I have played the battlefield1942s and callofduty just fine - we've have blasted thousands of ww2 enemies with it by now! - and only the battlefield 2 was choppy on it - it seemed at the time that replacing the xp1700 with an AMD xp2600 (266bus limited) and adding 512 sped it up enough to get by with battlefield2 at 800 res. Thanks!

 

reply to sharkfood

yes the $341 route looks smart too - thanks

should i wait a week or 2 or 3? - I keep hearing about cpu price drops this summer but i don't know the correct market timing / cpu sweet spot timing-wise

suggestions?

 

The whole problem is with BF2. 1 gig of ram is the minimum you can really hope to expect to get working with it, 1.5-2 gigs preferred. And due to this large memory usage, a 200-266 limited Socket A mainboard and CPU is going to be crippling the game. You'll be lucky to have a choppy/slow game, 16 player servers only, with all settings on their lowest.. and still be unable to pilot jets due to jerky/poor performance.

Believe me, I just went through this with two LAN PC's here.. same setup you're trying to construct for BF2. The minimum system we would up getting the game to play on 800x600 was a Barton based/333 system with 2 gigs. The 200/266 mainboard just couldn't muster the performance at any settings levels. They just dont have the horsepower or fast enough memory performance for playing BF2 online.

Plus- you're going to be into your upgrades for >$200... another $150 and you've got an AM2/PCI-Express with 1600 Pro videocard and DDR2-800mhz memories. With 1 gig, you'll still have to reduce some settings, but around xmas you can easily add another gig for <$100 and play maxed settings and on 64 player servers.

 

Ok - so I'm thinking this one may just be a good 2nd tier one for battlefield 1942 lan parties

and the way to battlefield 2 fun is a new computer route for 500-600 Thanks!


BTW - Have you tried Red Orchestra?

 

yep - I have an athlon 3200+ XP running with 1.5 gigs memory and an EVGA 7800 GS AGP card......

Doom 3 kicks *** now.