Here my specs

Pentium 4 3.20 ghz
512MB DDR SD Ram
ATI Radeon 9200SE AGP 128mb


Would it be wiser for me to purchase another 512 stick of SDRam or upgrade to the ATI Radeon 9800SE card. I can get them both for somewhere around the same price. Im looking forward to playing HL2, Doom3, and FarCry when I get around to purchasing them.

one thing ... DDR is NOT SDRam ... that's the whole point ... dual data rate vs Single Data Rate  (SD DD .. heh)

if you have SD, then getting the new vid card won't help, in fact, I'd get a new mobo that does DDR

if it's DDR, the new video card would help more ... the faster memory clock on it would make more of a pipe for your DDR ram to dump textures, instead of holding them, waiting for your slower card ...

I've played games on "medocer" systems with AWSOME vid cards that played well, if not good ...

If you've got the money tho, I'd say do both

(also, since you havea P4 3.2, I'm assuming it's DDr, I have NOT seen a SDR mobo for P4 3.2's yet ... )

hrm, well, that's DDR ... soundsl ike they're just throwing letters out there to make it sound fancy;)


either way, my recommendations are still true

yeah just hope it fits your HP case.. i had a friend of mine try to put in a radeon 9800 into his HP case and it wouldn't fit. HP apparently doesn't like people upgrading their stuff. It was a mid tower too

pc3200 is DDR (and the highest rated i think - or is there 3400?  kev?)

Go with the video card, if you want to take on the big games comin' in from around the block, definately get the better video. But not an SE. get an XT.

Pc3200 is middle of the line actually

they have PC3500, PC3700, PC4000, PC4500 and they're coming out with PC5000 soon ...

I have 2 512MB sticks of PC4000 in my system, runs at 500mhz, 1ghz with the DDR factoring in

hrm, well, that's DDR ... soundsl ike they're just throwing letters out there to make it sound fancy;)


either way, my recommendations are still true

Here, I'll learn ya....

DDR IS SDRAM....SDRAM stands for Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory. All RAM since the days of EDO (Extended Data Output) and FastPage memory has been SDRAM. You add the DDR to the beginning of it to indicate that the RAM is sending data on both the rising and falling edge of the sine wave that represents the clock cycle (hence double data rate). SDRAM does not stand for Single Data Rate, never has, never will.

Bottom line, my opinion is to get the video card. Right now that is acting as your bottle neck. Graphics cards come with enough memory for textures and such that they rarely, if ever, actually use the AGP bus for texture storage, it's just too slow, even at AGP 8x, to be effective, so game developers will avoid that.