radeon 9600xt vs gf 4200 on oldish pc

Hi all

My kids pc is an athlon xp2000 processor, 512mb ram, with a 4x agp mobo
and a 128mb geforce 4200 graphics card. I'm in the process of
upgrading the graphics card from my system, which is currently a radeon
9600xt 256mb card.

My question is this - I know that my radeon card is faster than the
geforce one and has more memory, but given that the other mobo only
supports 4x agp is it worthwhile swapping them over? The reason for
asking and not trying it is I've taken the card out of the old machine
before and it's a PIG to remove it - the design of the case is such
that you practically have to snap the card to get it out, so if there's
going to be little or no performance increase then I'd sooner not
bother.

The only other reason for doing it would be to take advantage of the
radeon's dx9 capabilities (not that the kids would appreciate it!!) but
am I right in thinking that that may actually slow the pc down, as
opposed to staying with the current dx8 card?

I'd be grateful for any thoughts

thanks

Richard

<richardpstanton RemoveThis @yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1138884305.651463.79190@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Hi all
>
> My kids pc is an athlon xp2000 processor, 512mb ram, with a 4x agp mobo
> and a 128mb geforce 4200 graphics card. I'm in the process of
> upgrading the graphics card from my system, which is currently a radeon
> 9600xt 256mb card.
>
> My question is this - I know that my radeon card is faster than the
> geforce one and has more memory, but given that the other mobo only
> supports 4x agp is it worthwhile swapping them over? The reason for
> asking and not trying it is I've taken the card out of the old machine
> before and it's a PIG to remove it - the design of the case is such
> that you practically have to snap the card to get it out, so if there's
> going to be little or no performance increase then I'd sooner not
> bother.
>
> The only other reason for doing it would be to take advantage of the
> radeon's dx9 capabilities (not that the kids would appreciate it!!) but
> am I right in thinking that that may actually slow the pc down, as
> opposed to staying with the current dx8 card?
>
> I'd be grateful for any thoughts
>
> thanks
>
> Richard
>
that 8x card will work fine in that 4x mobo and there will be little * if
any * performance differance between running it in a 8x slot versus a 4x
slot. for games that have scalable graphics you might want to run them in
Directx 8 mode anyway - like Half-Life 2. you wont use texture settings high
enough to take advantage of the 256mb memory without upgrading that 512mb
RAM to 1GB.