I would like to set this up for my stepson I have a older pc with Gigabyte GA-7S748. I would like to find out what I need as far as a video card so he can play Halo with it. It has windows xp home and maxed out with 3gb of memory with a 450 watt power supply. Currently with a GeForce 4 Mx 4000 which is ok for normal use but not for Halo. He likes to play online on mine but I need it for work so I built this instead ,I just need a better video card for him. I would like to keep it under $150.00 if I can. Thanks... Specs: CPU Type AMD Athlon XP, 2166 MHz (13 x 167) 2700+ Motherboard Name Gigabyte GA-7S748 (5 PCI, 1 AGP, 3 DDR DIMM Video Adapter NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 4000
I'm not sure if that CPU has enough horsepower to drive a video card to play Halo at acceptable levels. The motherboard has only a single AGP slot, which limits you to an AGP video card, which for the most part, is becoming obsolete. The motherboard DOES support 8x AGP, but your choices are VERY limited. Newegg's got 40 of them priced between $30 and $110.00. The Problem is that the processor is relatively weak, so if you choose a higher powered video card you may end up with a mismatch and you net gain would be zero.
"The motherboard has only a single AGP slot, which limits you to an AGP video card, which for the most part, is becoming obsolete" It's not becoming obsolite, it became obsolite years ago. For the money ($150), you would probably be better off buying a used xbox 360...at least that way he can play Halo 2.
Yea that's what I figured. I originally built it for him to do his school work on, just the web and now as he is getting older he wants to play a few online games. I may just end up building a new pc for him. I will post what I have in mind under "Building a new PC" to make sure everything is compatible. Thanks for all your help !