Hey guys, I have a old P4 3.0 prescott system with 2 gigs of gskill ddr 400 ram and a radeon 1650. The mother board i own is a Foxconn 661Gx7MJ which supports only AGP 8X, Blah... Anyhow, I want to play some newer games like Mass Effect, Fallout 3, Hellgate London, Crysis, Gears of War ect. I'm stuck between two video cards either a HIS Radeon 3650 or a Powercolor radeon 3850 both of which are fairly cheap in my opinion, but the performance ratio between the two on my system running windows XP is beyond me. Any help wpuld be greatly appreciated.
Your P4 will limit your performance every bit as much as the X1650. To get good games performance you will have to upgrade the CPU as well, and while you're at it, you should upgrade to PCI express, the fastest PCI express graphics card is more than triple the speed of the fastest AGP card.
