Upgrade - CPU or GF4 ?

[Guest jabberthecat]

OK, last fall i did as easy upgrade of my Dell XPS T600; I went fromthe 600mhz P3 to a 1ghz P3. I also got a GF3 64MB some time lastsummer.I thought my I was the end of the line for processor upgrades, butthere is a company called www.powerleap.com that uses celerons as upgrades for old slot 1 / slot 2 P3 systems. Their fastest chip right now is a 1.3, but Intel just released a 1.4 and I would expectat sometime there will even be a 1.5 available.So as far as upgrades go for FS2002 :1. from P3 1Ghz to Celeron 1.5 Ghz ( cost ~ $ 170.00 )OR2. from GF3 64m to some variant of the GF4 128 MB ( cost ~ ? $300.00 )What is choice for maximum performance gain in FS2002?Here is the spec on celeron ( I expect a 1.5 available sometime )Designed for 100MHz FSB Pentium II, Celeron, and Pentium III slot-1 (S.E.C.C.) systems, the PL-iP3/T 1.3 GHz upgrade includes: - A genuine Intel Celeron-II 1.3 GHz (Tualatin) CPU with 256K L2 cache and Data Prefetch LogicThanks,Myles

[Guest SD Sim]

You will be much better off upgrading your CPU, since this will be your bottleneck with what is already a good video card. But if I may, I would offer this alternative solution: for about $200 (US) you can purchase a new mainboard that supports an AMD Athlon XP1800+ CPU, which will be much faster than your current set up. I am in no way knocking the Pentium (I have both), it's just that the AMD CPU is much more cost effective in terms of performance return.

[Guest]

It looks like 1.4Ghz celerons are the highest speed grade that you can get. Seriously doubt there will be any further upgrade to that line of CPU's as intel just released their new line of Celerons based on a watered down P4 core. Historically that means the end of the line on the older line of CPU's I don't know what the cost of the 1.4GHz celeron kits will be, but it will be more than the $170 they get for a 1.3GHz. In my opinion a jump from 1Ghz to 1.4Ghz for the dollars spent doesn't make a lot of sence. As you scale up in frequency the importance of CPU to memory bandwidth becomes more important. With a FSB of 100MHz that is the main bottleneck to better performance. Even thought the percentage increase in clock speed is 40% you will not get a 40% increase in performance. I have seen benchmarks that pit a P3 1GHz with a 133 FSB against a 1.2GHz Celeron on a 100MHz FSB and found the results were pretty darn close, in some benchmarks the celeron won and some the P3. If you take that into consideration a 1.4 Ghz celeron may only be as fast a 1.2Ghz P3. Effectively you are only maybe getting 200Mhz real life performance increase.As for the video card upgrade you propose, you won't see any measurable difference in performance in FS2K2.Maybe as a suggestion upgrade your motherboardCPURam to a combination that will allow for a more substantial increase in performance. The cost could be in the range of what you would spend on your proposed video card. I do caution that if you go that route that the rest of your system can handle the upgrade. (ie. does your power supply have enough wattage to handle the higher end CPU's, etc..)Hope this helps..Scott