Advice on £100 upgrade to my system.

[thepeoplespal]

Right I've had good advice here before, so having recently divested myself of some junk on eBay I now have over £100 sitting in my Paypal account and I need it spent.

My PC spec is this:

NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 32MB - AGP Graphics Card
19" Iiyama Vision Master Pro 450 monitor (hefty beast)
Realtek AC'97 Audio for VIA built-in sound
40Gb and 80Gb HDDs
Socket A Processor x86 Family 6 Model 4 Stepping 4 AuthenticAMD ~1339 Mhz
XP Professional SP2
1Gb DDR 400 Memory
Gigabite KT400A MotherBoard (capable of taking AGP8x and DDR 400 memory - apparently)

I usually have at least 10 windows open at any one time, so I thought a Graphics card update would be the most appropriate upgrade - only problem is which one to go for. Advice on what I should attempt to buy, I fancy a dual monitor system but the relative speeds for Graphics listed at [url]www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2195&p=5[/url] doesn't help in this respect.

I'm happy enough to go the eBay route, for purchase.

[GregE240]

Why do you want a dual monitor card?

[thepeoplespal]

GregE240 said:

Why do you want a dual monitor card?

Cause I'm probably going to get a 20" tft and I don't really want to ditch the iiyama, if I can put it to good use and not have to flick between all my open windows as much. i.e. composing emails while viewing good old pistonheads. Doubt if it will be a DVI tft though.

[jfrf]

wouldnt have thought a better graphics card would help with multiple windows.

id only get a better card for gaming purposes

[Plotloss]

Upgrading the 3D ability of your VGA card will do nothing in 2D windows, the Riva is more than capable.

It sounds like you need more screen real estate, a common issue.

Two monitors and a dual headed vga card or a bigger CRT which supports a massive resolution.

[Podie]

Plotloss said:

Two monitors and a dual headed vga card or a bigger CRT which supports a massive resolution.

Think I've got a Matrox Milenium G550 (dual screen thingy supporting VGA and DVI outputs) if you're interested.

[GregE240]

Plotloss said:

Upgrading the 3D ability of your VGA card will do nothing in 2D windows, the Riva is more than capable. It sounds like you need more screen real estate, a common issue. Two monitors and a dual headed vga card or a bigger CRT which supports a massive resolution.

Its only a 32MB card though Matt?

And our man only has a ton to play with...

[Plotloss]

Oh and if you fancy an Iiyama TFT drop me a line via profile

[Plotloss]

GregE240 said:

Plotloss said: Upgrading the 3D ability of your VGA card will do nothing in 2D windows, the Riva is more than capable. It sounds like you need more screen real estate, a common issue. Two monitors and a dual headed vga card or a bigger CRT which supports a massive resolution. Its only a 32MB card though Matt? And our man only has a ton to play with...

Doesnt matter in 2D mode really.

He could in reality add another 32mb PCI TNT2 and get decent Windows performance on two monitors.

Its only gamey stuff that requires real meat, drawing windows is childs play, technically.

[thepeoplespal]

Didn't know you could have a pci and agp cards at the same time.

I would have thought a newer graphics card would make photoshop and acrobat 7 a bit quicker on the redraw, 2D performance is the most important thing for me as I only play older games occassionally (toca 2 etc).

[thepeoplespal]

Podie said:

Plotloss said: Two monitors and a dual headed vga card or a bigger CRT which supports a massive resolution. Think I've got a Matrox Milenium G550 (dual screen thingy supporting VGA and DVI outputs) if you're interested.

Does it do two VGA outputs at the same time? and is a G550 faster than what I've already got.

[Plotloss]

Well more VGA memory will help as it'll be able to dump more from main memory at once.

FSB speed and main RAM will probably be the biggest improvement as it will cut down the swapping.

But you can mix and match VGA cards at will.

[Podie]

thepeoplespal said:

Podie said: Plotloss said: Two monitors and a dual headed vga card or a bigger CRT which supports a massive resolution. Think I've got a Matrox Milenium G550 (dual screen thingy supporting VGA and DVI outputs) if you're interested. Does it do two VGA outputs at the same time? and is a G550 faster than what I've already got.

It has a single socket on the back, which then feeds a "breakout cable" to which you can attach 2x VGA or 2x DVI or 1x DVI & 1x VGA.

It enables you to have two monitors displaying different things... eg you could have Outlook on one screen and IE on another... or two different IE windows...

I'll double check tonight to see which model it is.

[thepeoplespal]

So is there no 2D performance gains to be had over my current Graphics Card?

[wolves_wanderer]

thepeoplespal said:

So is there no 2D performance gains to be had over my current Graphics Card?

Nope, the only thing you will get is the potential to run at higher resolutions and colour depths but even that won't be a factor if you have a monitor smaller than about 20".

[thepeoplespal]

wolves_wanderer said:

thepeoplespal said: So is there no 2D performance gains to be had over my current Graphics Card? Nope, the only thing you will get is the potential to run at higher resolutions and colour depths but even that won't be a factor if you have a monitor smaller than about 20".

Hmmm? So what would you folks suggest for a speed-up, another processor to fit my motherboard or what?

[Zad]

To be honest you are pretty much maxed out. Socket A systems came to the end of the line quite a time ago now and any faster cpu you can squeeze in there isn't going to achieve more than a few % increase in speed.

A faster graphics card may make it feel a bit snappier, but be aware that many recent cards run at a different voltage to the older ones, and they may well not fit in the AGP slot. Running dual head into 19" LCD seems a bit like fitting a Y reg Fiesta 950 with leather and aircon to be honest. Just as old cars get to the point when spending money on them doesn't help, it's better to save your cash for a new motherboard and CPU.

If your hard drives are quite old then it might be worth getting a new 320GB one with 8MB cache and installing Windows on there. If you have had XP installed more than a year or so it is worth doing a fresh install anyway as it progressively gets cluttered up and slows down without you realising.

[robdickinson]

Try and monitor your memory usage, lots of running apps + heavy graphics may well bust 1gb mem out and thats why your PC is acting slower at times, swap space is very slow - especialy if you can do any one or two of these tasks on their own ok. £100 prob buy you an extra gig of ram.

I'd agree with all the above, another vid card (or upgrade) wont help 2D graphics much, the TNT2 wasnt a 2D quality start but it performed fine.
Moving forward from that system means a hefty upgrade, your end of the line CPU on that board.

[thepeoplespal]

Spoiled at work I guess, where a lot of the time I have to run two computers using the same programme (can't run to versions of the programme on the same computer) at more less at the same time. Just flit back and forth as and when necessary, while I'm waiting for them to do their stuff.

Not sure this was how it was envisaged I would use the system, but it works for me and I reckon it can save at least a minute per transaction on hundreds of transactions.

Having ruled out wasting money on upgrading my system to increase spead, a dual head system with two monitors might just be the way to go for me to get a bit more mileage out of my current system, before an upgrade to a dual core system of some sort.

Thanks for the guidance on 2D graphics.