Reply 100 of 105, by FFXIhealer
So thinking AGAIN about my Athlon-based Windows XP computer here....there's almost no point in bothering with it because it's only a few years earlier than my Dell laptop (Windows XP). But looking back to when I built it, I can't help but think about how little I knew about PC gaming and hardware back in the day. I mean, look at my history.
I wanted a "gaming" PC in 1998/1999, but I ended up getting a Diamond Stealth II G460. Turns out, that's only an Intel i740 graphics chip with 8MB of memory. Worked fine, but from what I know now, that's only a mid-level card. At the time, the big names were Voodoo2/3, nVidia's RIVA TNT chips, and ATI's Rage series, right?
Then I built a new PC in 2002/2003 around the AMD Athlon XP processor. And I bought an ATI Radeon 7500 64MB AGP card. Not bad. But then get this...a few years later the card dies and I want to "upgrade" to a more powerful card, right? So what the hell did my ignorant ass buy? A Radeon 9550! Like, a shitty mid-level card that performs (AT BEST) only on-par with the previous 7500! The MB is only a 4X AGP port, so it's not like I have many options for upgrading with used hardware. I think the best I could get in the ATI cards is a 9800XT, but there are literally only Apple cards available. Everything else is $100 for a 9800 Pro.
But take the laptop.
Instead of the 1.53GHz AMD Athlon XP 1800+, it's got a 2.1GHz Intel Pentium M.
Instead of the 1GB of DDR-166 memory, it's got 2GB of DDR2-533 memory.
Instead of the ATI Radeon 9550 256MB AGP card, it's got an nVidia GeForce 7800GTX 256MB PCI-Express card.
Both run Windows XP.
No real need to fuck with this old Athlon system.
Then again.... I COULD turn it into a Linux box. Hmmm.....