I have an older computer, a Dell Dimension 4400. It's no where near great, but given that right now buying a new computer isn't in our budget I wanted to make a few upgrades to it.
I started off buying 512 MB of RAM. It was perfect, a nice boost in performance for a good price. I got to looking around a little more for any more improvements I could make and decided on a new video card. Nothing fancy, but something better than the GeForce2 MX 400 we had.
I purchased a ATI Radeon x1300 AGP card. Although I was sent the wrong power supply cables at first they were replaced and set-up was fine. The card says it requires 300W PSU, but our Dell 4400 only has a generic 250W PSU. Which after doing some reading on PSUs is probably putting out less Watts than that. I wasn't too sure how this would work, but everything has been fine for about two weeks now.
My problem is that after upgrading to this Radeon card from a puny 64 MB video card theres very, very little performance increase. Is this normal? I'm not trying to run Doom 3 or anything on my system, I just play a few small online games that really don't require too much power, but with this new video card theres hardly any noticeable difference to my game play. I still have system lag when other people are on screen running around and such. I expected the new video card would help quite a lot with this because it isn't a very flashy game or anything, but no dice.
Is this because of my PSU? Could it be related to another problem? I was hoping this would be a nice band aid until we could afford a new computer in a few months, but right now I'm really quite disappointed. I don't want to go buy a new PSU and have the exact same problems too. Any recommendations would be great.
System specs:
Dell Dimension 4400
Intel D845PT
Pentium 4 1.6Ghz
512MB DDR-SDRAM
ATI Radeon x1300 AGP
Windows XP Home
Cable Internet
I started off buying 512 MB of RAM. It was perfect, a nice boost in performance for a good price. I got to looking around a little more for any more improvements I could make and decided on a new video card. Nothing fancy, but something better than the GeForce2 MX 400 we had.
I purchased a ATI Radeon x1300 AGP card. Although I was sent the wrong power supply cables at first they were replaced and set-up was fine. The card says it requires 300W PSU, but our Dell 4400 only has a generic 250W PSU. Which after doing some reading on PSUs is probably putting out less Watts than that. I wasn't too sure how this would work, but everything has been fine for about two weeks now.
My problem is that after upgrading to this Radeon card from a puny 64 MB video card theres very, very little performance increase. Is this normal? I'm not trying to run Doom 3 or anything on my system, I just play a few small online games that really don't require too much power, but with this new video card theres hardly any noticeable difference to my game play. I still have system lag when other people are on screen running around and such. I expected the new video card would help quite a lot with this because it isn't a very flashy game or anything, but no dice.
Is this because of my PSU? Could it be related to another problem? I was hoping this would be a nice band aid until we could afford a new computer in a few months, but right now I'm really quite disappointed. I don't want to go buy a new PSU and have the exact same problems too. Any recommendations would be great.
System specs:
Dell Dimension 4400
Intel D845PT
Pentium 4 1.6Ghz
512MB DDR-SDRAM
ATI Radeon x1300 AGP
Windows XP Home
Cable Internet