Upgrade Graphics and memory in PC

Cricri

I agree with Blacksheep1979: an upgarde to play Prey smoothly for £70? No way. I can only recommend you to get a second hand card on eBay. I got my 9800XT from eBay for about £55 last year. That's not the top of the notch, but it's DX9 compliant, within your budget, and not bad at all. I mean, compare to your MX400, it's like day and night. In fact, your current card is so poor that you can't even sell it to raise more cash, you'd be lucky to get £5 for it. And not from me
Also note that with GFX card, bus width and speed is more important than RAM, although people do tend to love the high GFX RAM numbers (maybe because it's easy to understand and to relate to?).

Blacksheep1979

yup maybe look for a second hand x800xt pe (platinum edition) - they should be round the £70-90 mark and will perform okish in games.

michael_p_4

Are you both absolutely sure that is the best advice? Say he manages to get it to run on his P4 1.9 with the AGP card you recommend (and given the *minimum*, not recommended, spec is P4 2.0 it may fail on this if the graphics card passes). Now consider the scenario that the next game he buys in a month won't run without a bettter CPU. He'll have to replace the motherboard/cpu/memory/psu (call it £200) and have wasted £70 on an AGP card as he'll need a PCI-E one.

Blacksheep1979

he won't NEED a pci-e card but I am just trying to fit in arround his budget - we have said £70 isn't much to work with.

And anyway your method has him spending that £200 and then buying a pci-e card. If he bought an agp card then wanted to upgrade in a couple of months then if the card was bought via ebay second hand he would get 90% of his money back (maybe more if lucky).

Cricri

My 9800XT is DX9 compliant, and of course, so is the X800. I'm 95% sure that the only reason why he can't run Prey is because his GFX card isn't DX9 compliant.
He won't have wasted his money: if he's got £70, I bet that he doesn't plan on getting a PCI-E card anytime soon! Why? Well, let's see, he'd have to change mobo and CPU before even wondering which GFX card to buy, as you rightly pointed out. If his budget is £70 now, I doubt it will be £300 next month!

michael_p_4

I like the buy and sell via ebay idea - if that really is feasible, that is definitely a smart move, effectively renting the card

My point was buying an AGP card and memory when the motherboard/CPU are just as in need of upgrading and would make the AGP card and memory redundant might be the cheapest approach in the short term but potentially more expensive in the long term. I thought it was something the original poster might want to consider, that was all.