Going to donate a good computer to a school and suddenly this item came in, so the fastest Pentium 4 computer at 1.7GH can only have an AGP video card that goes up to 4x, but annoyingly the other computer is just a 1.4GH Pentium 4 but with an AGP slot that can go up to 8x.
I’m getting an AGP video card for either computer and I hope if any doper has a good rule of thumb or information on what would be the best combination to display graphics? Or is the memory in the video card the best thing to look for?
I think I will add the new video card to the computer with the higher GH speed. I guess this is why that video hardware format is going away, not much more to offer at 8x.
It is more common to run into the processor being a bottle-neck than a new video card being the bottle neck. This holds especially true with older processors like yours (from what it sounds). You can get much better 3D performance simply going from on-board video to a dedicated AGP video card. You remove a huge weight from these weaker processors shoulders by moving those processes to another processor.
A lot of times older computers have smaller amounts of RAM as well, and spending as little as $20 or $30 in the right stores on doubling or tripling your RAM will make a huge difference.