Looking to upgradge my motherboard, i need some help

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Jezzz

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Hi, I am not sure if i need to upgrade my motherboard. I want to play battlefield 2 and it says that i need a 128Mb video card at least. I have a Nvidia Geforce4 MX 64mb. What I want to do is get a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb. I have an Emachines T2825 computer, and I have no idea what motherboard I have. How do I find out what motherboard I have? I also want to get pentium 4 3.0 processor. Will my motherboard run a pentium 4 processor, and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb? Im stumped. Please give me some help.
 
You should be able to put a never AGP card like the ATI you mentioned. NVIDIA is much better though and probably more compatible with your system.


I'll check on t2825
 
YOU CANNOT put a P4 in your computer. Your computer is an AMD based motherboard.

Here are your specs:
eMachines T2825
CPU: AMD Athlon™ XP 2800+ Processor (2.083 GHz) with QuantiSpeed™ architecture
Operating System: Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition 1
Chipset: NVIDIA® nForce™2
Memory: 512 MB DDR (PC 2700)
Hard Drive: 120 GB HDD 2
Optical Drives: 48x Max. CD-RW Drive; 16x Max. DVD Drive; 3.5" 1.44MB FDD; 8-in-1 Media Reader(USB 2.0, Secure Digital (SD), Smart Media, Compact Flash, Memory Stick, Memory Stick PRO, Micro Drive, Multimedia Card)
Video: NVIDIA® GeForce4™ MX graphics (1 AGP 8x slot available)
Sound: nForce™ 6-channel Audio
Modem: 56K ITU v.92 ready Fax/Modem
Network: 10/100Mbps built-in Ethernet
Peripherals: Premium Plus Multimedia Keyboard, 2-Button Wheel Mouse, Amplified Stereo Speakers
Dimensions: 7.25"w x 14.125"h x 16"d
Ports/Other: 5 USB 2.0 ports (4 in back; 1 in Media Reader), 1 Serial, 1 Parallel, 2 PS/2, Audio-In & Out
 
you cannot put a pentium4 in your motherboard. P4s are intel based. your MB can only take AMD XP processors. I am not sure what the max AMD XP processor your MB can take, I would check with the manufactuer.

You can upgrade your graphics card though.
 
Ok, another question is... If I get the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 mb, can I put it in my emachines, and eventually take it out and put it into another computer?
 
No. Unless you want to completely rebuild your computer which wouldn't be cost effective.

The highest processor your motherboard could probably take is the Athlon XP 3000. It
wouldn't be worth upgrading the CPU as the speed difference is negligable.

Both the XP 2800 and the XP3000 are 333mhz front side bus. Your motherboard would only support 333 FSB therefore the XP 3200 is out of the question, it is a 400 FSB.

400FSB require PC3200 RAM.

Your motherboard cannot handle PC3200 ram.

You can always swap video cards out. You have to make sure the motherboard you put it into can handle that type of video card.

Basically there are 4 types of video cards:
VGA (Very old and outdated and almost no computers have it now.)
PCI - outdated
AGP 2x/4x/8x - common. 8X being the most recent. AGP 8x cards for the most part are backwards compatible to 4x and 2x speeds.
PCI-E (PCI Express) - the latest and not quite fully developed by software makers. Your computer cannot take PCI-E . AGP cards will be around for a while and are very comparible to the latest PCI-E cards. Some in fact, are faster. As a rule of thumb, get the video card with the most onboard memory on the card. The latest video cards for AGP have 512MB. Onboard video memory relieves the CPU from some graphics processing.

I have an XP2500 in my computer with 1.5 gigs of onboard memory and an NVIDIA AGP card that has 128megs memory on it . I can play Doom 3 and a few other newer games quite easily. The XP 2500 and the XP3200 are 400 FSB CPUs. I have DDR400 (PC3200) memory.
 
Regarding changing your motherboard: this will probably require re-activation of XP. I had to do this for a friend. See my thread on this issue: https://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?t=25570

However, based upon your system specs, I wouldn't upgrade the mobo. Just get a good video card. The nVidia 6600GT is a good buy (~$150.00) right now from my perspective.
 
Jezzz said:
so there isnt a thing I can do to use an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128mb?

For the same amount of money, I would go with the XFX GeForce 6600 GT 128MB AGP card. I have it and it's great. I got it from tigerdirect for $190 but it had a $30 rebate which made it $160.

An ATI Radeon 9800 can't touch it.
 
if you read the messages, I already mentioned the 3000XP, but the speed difference as I stated would be negligable.
 
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