Advice on mid-life vid card upgrade for a PIII/933

[Moose1]

Subject about says it all.  I have a Gateway PIII/933, 512 MB RAM, currently running a GeForce 2 Pro 32 MB AGP with the 29.41 Detonator drivers.  I really can't afford to replace this thing right now and would like to squeeze at least 12 more months out of it, so I was thinking about replacing the video card in a couple months, and maybe the sound card if I get lucky.

Considering that the system doesn't have a real fast CPU, would a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 give me a significant speed boost?  I can run AH all right, but I'd like to be able to still smoothly run it at 1280x1024 with at least 2x FSAA--right now I get about 75 fps in 1280x1024 with no FSAA if I'm alone.  And of course, a 933 is bottom-end these days for some of the newer games coming out--there's places in good ol' Everquest that slaughter the frame rate, although EQ's got a very inefficient graphic engine.

I can't afford to drop the money unless I know I'm going to get good results, so any advice would be appreciated.  Thanks!

[Wanker]

Hey Moose,

Sounds like your CPU is the bottleneck. But it's not all that slow, to be honest. I think if you went with the GF4 Ti-4200 you'd be happy with the performance with 2xFSAA. Just that one change should keep that sytem working fine for another year.