Nvidia FX5200 128MB PCI-Questions

[XtremeZero]

Well, I finally got it today. I now own a Nvidia Card for the first time. My Feelings for it?

I Love It!

Its a whole lot better than my stupid onboard card. I can now play Lords of Everquest (Hey, it was $3.00, I couldn't resist :D) , Everquest with high quality settings, and Anarchy Online. I'm hopeing I can run EQ2, or DAoC. System Specs:

Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHZ
386MB Ram
Nvidia FX5200 128MB
80GB Hard Drive
5 Dust Bunnies (Who died today, thanks to my mini vacum :P)

What I'm asking is, can I play EQ2 or DAoC (Catacombs) with these specs? Any info will greatly help, thank you :)

[tangledinyrhair]

I would up the RAM... it has a huge difference in performance(DDR if possible). Otherwise your system should handle most anything you throw at it.

[XtremeZero]

Should I up it to 512? Or do you mean *gulp* 1 GB :(

[tangledinyrhair]

I use 512 DDR which is fine, I still get a little laggy but nothing big.

[XtremeZero]

Will it work fine while doing a raid or something? (ARE there raids in DAoC? :P)

[Tenolein]

512 is fine for what you're using the puter for, but for EQ2, 1Gig is required. =/ Didn't mean to be the bearer of bad news.

If you got the 1Gig of RAM, yer puter would be better than mine (thanks to yer CPU). And mine runs EQ2 pretty good on medium settings.

You never know man.

[XtremeZero]

Lets check out newegg *sigh* :?

EDIT: Not too bad, seems reasonable:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-156-019&depa=1

That and a new office rolling chair means along time to save. Maybe EQ2 will drop in price.

[darkpaw]

You have a 2.4ghz system but it didn't have an agp slot? I haven't seen one since about PIII 800 that hadn't.

512 is decent for memory on most things, unless you're crazy like me and try and do something like run 4 eq instances on the same machine when I was still playing.

[XtremeZero]

512 is decent for memory on most things, unless you're crazy like me and try and do something like run 4 eq instances on the same machine when I was still playing.

:shock:

...Wow...

Well, I just wanna run EQ2 or DAoC without alot of lag.

[Eucep]

With the choise of taking a PCI version you will get lag no matter what ammount of ram you use unfortunately.

[XtremeZero]

With the choise of taking a PCI version you will get lag no matter what ammount of ram you use unfortunately.

...I will pretend you never said that...

[Chewbenator]

I have the same card. Isn't the best but it is a good value. Until my new computer gets back from repairs I have overclocked it to 300Mhz Core, 450 Memory. With the crappy onboard fan that came with it I can play for 6 hours on Wow with decent settings without much lag at all.

While I was in the EQ2 beta I didn't have it overclocked and could play fairly well with lower settings. But, this computer has a 1.5ghz P4, along with 512 sdram. So results may differ.

Then theres always the PCI thing.

(edit*) oh mines the AGP version btw.

[Zutan]

uhm just one question. did you say PCI ? is that a missprint and you ment AGP. or PCI express ?...... but pci.... i didnt think they still made PCI cards. an AGP 5200 should handle anything up to EQ2 (on low graphics settings).

512 ram for the computer is the bare min you should have really. i know people running EQ2 (with full graphics except for textures thats set to high not ultrahigh) who have a gig and a half of ram and when running it they have 120 megs of ram free.

[DocBobo]

What slows PCI graphic cards down is the speed (more the absence of) of the PCI bus compared to AGP. While AGP 2.1 has a bandwith of 2.1GB/s, PCI is limited to 128MB/s.

Since the PCI bus is shared between many components like sound card, network card, IDE controller and USB bus, the bandwith of 128BM/s is more or less theoretical by nature. If you assume that a PCI graphic card gets about half of the PCI bandwith, an AGP card can transfer 16-32 times as much data as a PCI one [in the same time frame].

Internally, the cards work at the same speed, but everytime it needs to load textures (for instance when you zone) the PCI card will fall behind quite a lot. This however will only be the case in texture heavy applications. Like most MMORPGs.

This isn't to say the card is bad. In fact it's the fastest you will be able to get. This is just to illustrate the limitations of the design.