End-of-Lifecycle upgrade

[drone]

Tomshardware says X1650PRO is the best AGP card for <$100 as of February. I picked one up yesterday at Newegg for $70 with free shipping. I also plunked down $80 for 2gb ram. Hopefully that will keep me happy until I build a new rig.

I just did what you did Tuesday night. I ordered 2 GB of RAM and the HIS ATI X1650 Pro 512MB IceQ from Newegg. Haven't ordered a replacement processor yet, I was looking at some benchmarks and got confused. The 2800+ Thoroughbred did better than the 3000+ Barton in a lot of performance tests.

I looked at the X1650 XT cards, but couldn't really justify the cost considering the future of the machine. The Pro should work fine, and the extra system RAM will be a godsend.

[ReiseReise]

Got my parts yesterday after my shipment was misrouted by UPS (Grrrrr). Sapphire X1650 PRO 512 and Patriot 2x1GB DDR 3200.

I spent half a day messing around before I could use my pc again.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Popped the new ram and vid card in, boot up, install drivers all is good, then noticed the ram was running at FSB -33 so I changed that and things went from minor problem to unable to POST. After many ram-swappings and CMOS clears i resigned myself to the fact that my mobo will not let the new ram run at its advertised speed - oh well, this will all be replaced in a few months anyway. I also ran into problems because after the crash I moved my PC out of the room so I had space to lay it out on the floor, and I was using an old 15 inch monitor instead of moving my heavy-as-lead 19inch CRT. On first boot the monitor worked, then no more as soon as windows loaded - the refresh rate was all messed up and the image was garbage so I couldn't even see what I was doing to change it. After 2 hours of thinking my power supply couldn't handle the new card (Ok i was actually just looking for an excuse to buy something else new), I swapped my old card back in and had the same problem - ooops, the old monitor was OLD (circa 1996) and couldn't multi-sync to adjust to the video settings. I hooked up my dad's LCD and magic - it worked.

Now I am still dealing with driver issues. The ATI drivers on the Sapphire CD are crap, M2TW and any other game immediately CTD while loading. Admittedly I was impatient and didn't uninstall the previous drivers beforehand so maybe that is the problem. I read other people had luck with Omega (modified ATI) drivers so I uninstalled everything ATI and installed the Omegas but got ridiculous frame rates (1 fps) on M2TW so I will try something else. I read Catalyst 4.2 or some other old version works with X1k series AGP cards, but I don't have the willpower to try them right now after fighting with this all day. Any suggestions are welcome.

On a bright note, the difference between 512MB and 2GB ram is HUGE. Loading times for M2TW seem almost instant compared to what they were (I used to go the bathroom, smoke a cigarette, come back, damn, still loading my battle....) When I close the game I can immediately open Firefox or whatever instead of having to wait 30 seconds. When browsing files in Photoshop the thumbnails open almost immediately instead of 1 every few seconds. Very nice indeed.

I really wish I didn't have to work tonight so I could get this figured out, but alas, the money has to come from somewhere

[Papewaio]

You can go to corsair, enter your MB model and they normally give the supported RAM.

[drone]

My stuff showed up Monday, I'll probably put it in this weekend. My mobo has 3 memory slots, but only the first one supports PC3200, so I knew I would not be able to run at those rates.

I'm probably going to start with drivers straight from ATI, not the ones on the disk. My experience with ATI is that you definitely have to uninstall the previous drivers. Following the ATI drivers menu, they point to Catalyst 8.3 for XP and the X1650.
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_ca...=xp/radeonx-xp