My daughter’s first PC is an old Dell that, when new, was pre-installed with Windows Me. It’s got a Socket 370 motherboard, probably some aging celeron inside. I’ve upgraded its RAM and stuck my valid license of W2K on it. A few weeks ago, it mysteriously stopped working, so I took another old PC from my father, this one with a P4 CPU and an AGP slot ((ASUS mobo P4s533-e, to be exact)). I had a valid license of Vista so I decided to install it, even though the integrated graphics chipset means it won’t do any fancy Aero tricks. And all was good. (Though I did need to order a DVD drive from NewEgg so I could actually do a clean Vista install).
Strangely, after all of this, suddenly the old kids’ PC started working again. Dunno what happened there, but oookay. So now, might as well let my daughter have that one back, and spruce up the other one. So I am ordering some PC 3200 RAM to bring it up to 2GB, and am trying to sort through the various AGP video card options. I’ve decided that this is as good an opportunity as any to test the World of Warcraft waters, so I need an AGP card that is compatible with the board, will run WoW or similar games with enough juice, and ideally cost under $100 (actually, hitting the $50 mark would be even better).
I spent/wasted an hour on newegg and I am hopelessly confused. ATI or nvidia? 256 or 512? how many vertex shaders do I need? so far I’m somewhat tentatively interested in a radeon x1650pro manufactured by Sapphire (100175L). it’s about 50 bucks. is this too much? nowhere near enough? Ive no clue. Help!
UPDATE – anyone have any WoW guest passes?
wow actually scales down really well. you could probably play it right now with the integrated graphics, though i doubt you’d get 30fps, and you’d have to turn all the effects off. (i play on a macbook air, and it’s workable, if a bit laggy.)
thats probably true, though my CPU is a bit underpowered (a socket 478 Pentium 4 at 1ghz, the minimum suggested spec. also, i have integrated audio too so the load on eth cpu is even higher.). I really want to use someone’s guest pass rather than spend $20 just to get a feel for it. There was supposed to be a free trial on the WoW website but the link leads to a broken page..
i should have one kicking around somewhere if i can find the box. i’ll email it to you if i can dig it up.
actually I got the site to work for teh ten day trial period. Ill give that a shot. Im trusting your advice on it being okay with integrated graphics 🙂
emphasis on “ok”. you’ll be missing out on a lot of special effects, and the frame rate will suffer, so don’t judge the graphic quality by this trial.