I've done some Benchies on some old-ish systems

Last night, I had a chance to spend some time doing what I've wanted to do for ages:

Determine what advice to give people looking to upgrade from systems about 2-3 years old.
In essence: should someone with an older system, such as this Athlon T-Bird, buy a second hand card like a 9700 Pro and expect much?

This is both NON SCIENTIFIC and I was quite quite drunk ;)

BUT itr shows, in MY OPINION, that you CAN get away with spending £50 or £60 on a second hand card and get a very playable game again.

Athlon 1.0 512 mb PC133 and a Kryo 2 64mb card 3dMark 2001 SE - 4700
Athlon 1.0 512 mb PC133 with £42 Radeon 9500 Pro overclocked to 9700 Pro speeds.....6698
Athlon 1.4 512 mb PC133 with the same 9500 @ 9700 Pro .....8700 points.

I also tried my XP2800 2x512 DDR 2700 nforce 2 in the mix.
Radeon 9000 OEM card 128mb, default, slow clocks 7680

Now I dont wanna sound too boring, but the older machine with the 1400 chpi in it, running a £42 second hand card plays very well indeed. Il-2 and Chronicles of Riddick played smoother and better on it. I wasEXPECTING the CPU to bottle neck it to death, and the slow ram to kill it dead.

WRONG....quite acceptable.

The 2600XP/2800XP style systems are very easy and cheap to build now, so would it be worth someone doing that too?

Frankly...if you have P4 1.7 gig ish, or an Athlon 1400 ish with enough ram (512) I'd get myself a second hand card for £50 and see.

Because the 1.4 system with a cheap good card in it, was waay better than I'd expected.

Now no one slag me off for my lack of science, lack of direction or weird writing style. Just go get that old PC from your Dad, whack a good card in it and get a LAN party going.

I'm gonna do that exact thing :)