Power, power, POWERRRRR!!!

[screwtype]

Uh, it doesn't matter. Video cards don't saturate an AGP4x bus, the performance difference between AGP4x and AGP8x is <1%.

Yeah, I have read that there isn't nearly as much difference as you might think. But <1% sounds a bit exaggerated.

Anyhow, as I said, it seems to run okay in AGPx4. I'd prefer it if it ran it x8, but if it won't, I can probably live with it.

I always found it worthwhile to just keep using the system untill it's really old, and then replace the whole thing.

I should probably have done that, but I thought I was going to do just a cheap little upgrade. I started out with a $300 budget for the Celeron system. Then I got greedy for more power and took it back to the store and exchanged it for the Athlon system. The price went up to $415.

Then the new mobo blew up my 300 watt PS. So I bought a 550 watt for $60. Then I found the new system wouldn't run reliably in Windows98SE, so I had to upgrade to XP. Another $135. And now that I've got XP, I really should get another 512 Mb RAM, because the 512 Mb I've already got isn't much for an OS that just by itself takes up more than 200 Mb. Another $80. And I'll probably have to get better quality RAM this time. Another $20.

And finally, it's really time I got rid of these cheap old speakers and got a nice set of Logitech 5.1's. Another $100.

So my "cheap" $300 upgrade is going to end up costing me around $800

Did I mention that I could use a bigger hard drive?

I've been using an AMD64-3000 for a while now and it runs very well. I can use 8x AGP through the Catalyst Control Center that runs my 9800 Pro and all is very stable.

You lucky, lucky basket

Anyway, you should really get pci xpress as the next thing, so I'd just keep the system as it is, if you only want to play rtw, doesnt really demand much compared to other games on the market (or The Elder Scrolls 4 when it arrives).

When I bought my video card a year ago, I made enquiries about PCI-Express and folks said, "don't bother with it! It will be ages before it's cheap and affordable." So I bought my Radeon AGP card instead. And now here we are just a year down the track and there's hardly a new mobo or vid card that supports AGP. Incredible how fast it became redundant. But having just recently spent $350 on the AGP card, I really couldn't afford to go with PCI-Express this time.

But next time, I think I'll go with my own gut feeling instead