SPCR

I have an old 939 AMD system with an Athlon 3000+ CPU and an even more ancient Geforce2 GTS video card. I don't play games, but sometimes I wonder if my video card is so old that it is causing issues when I try to watch videos etc. Is there any point in upgrading the video card to something a bit faster? Can I find something a bit faster that doesn't use more power?

Considering the last drivers were released in 2005 for this 12-13 yr old card, it's highly likely you could have problems.
Your chip consumes 8-9W. For recent gpus, that area is pretty much relegated to integrated graphics. You could go with the HD 6450 or HD 6570. They'll use a few watts more power for your applications, but will play whatever you throw at it. But, does your mobo support PCI-e graphics?

If you are stuck with AGP, this might be the time to think about tossing the 939. You could get a $50 Ivybridge Pentium, $50 mobo, and 4GB of DDR3 RAM and call it a day.

CA_Steve wrote:but will play whatever you throw at it. But, does your mobo support PCI-e graphics?

Unless it's one of the tiny number of strange motherboards that supported both AGP and PCI-E (there were a few) then AGP will be the only option for them.

In terms of newer AGP cards, there haven't been any reference design models for over 5 years. As you don't care about gaming power there is no point in spending a lot of money so it might not be worth it at all as Steve suggests. What might be of interest is that the Geforce 2 won't support hardware acceleration of video decoding so this may be a bottleneck when you are watching videos.

Getting a modern CPU, motherboard and RAM with onboard graphics would cover the hardware video acceleration much better. You shouldn't have to replace anything else in your system I would not expect.

edh wrote:Getting a modern CPU, motherboard and RAM with onboard graphics would cover the hardware video acceleration much better. You shouldn't have to replace anything else in your system I would not expect.

I'd not be so sure. For instance a dvd drive on a 939 board might use pata, try finding a new board supporting that... Or some add-on cards like tuner cards, pci slots are very rare on micro-atx boards or smaller nowadays.
(That said I'd certainly agree it might be worthwile to upgrade board/cpu/memory - you could also get recent pci graphics card if you really wanted but not worth investing money in such an old box. Though that socket 939 board _could_ be pcie the gts2 in there could be pci not agp after all, in which case a new graphic card might make a bit more sense as the low-end pcie ones are cheaper than the pci ones, still not exactly an exciting upgrade however.)

Pata to Sata rules

https://www.google.de/search?q=pata+to+ ... 80&bih=910

And honestly, if you couldn't spare the few Dollars for a different optical drive, you might not upgrade at all. I assume that any special legacy card of importance would/should have been mentioned in the first place.

If less power consuption is the main goal, then you completly do away with any AMD cpu/board because any given intel cpu and board use significantly less power at the same performance.

At this point I think you will better and cheaper off looking for second hand motherboard + CPU combinations. I dare say that even an Atom board will match your current performance.

A A64 3000+ S939 is a 1.8Ghz K8. There's absolutely no way an atom is going to touch that single-thread performance (the fastest ones would be around ~60% as fast maybe). 1 core 2 threads models might be close in multi-thread performance, and of course multicore ones will have better multithread performance.
I bet though for what the OP is using this box the perceived performance would be lower with an atom (otherwise he'd have upgraded a long time ago...). Of course, power consumption would be _much_ lower too.

mczak wrote:A A64 3000+ S939 is a 1.8Ghz K8. There's absolutely no way an atom is going to touch that single-thread performance (the fastest ones would be around ~60% as fast maybe). 1 core 2 threads models might be close in multi-thread performance, and of course multicore ones will have better multithread performance.
I bet though for what the OP is using this box the perceived performance would be lower with an atom (otherwise he'd have upgraded a long time ago...). Of course, power consumption would be _much_ lower too.

Ops, I mistook it for the XP 3000+.

As much as I am for longevity in systems, the better power management of modern systems will likely amortise the cost of an upgrade quickly, in particular if you have a nose around second hand components.

You might look for a GeForce FX 5900 agp card. By now lots of high end agp cards are being thrown away.

You might find one cheap now and its 2-3 generations newer than the GeForce2.

On the other band, support is discontinued and I think its only a directx 9 card which is why those systems are being thrown away.

If you do come to the point of upgrading for PCIe or modern integrated graphics, think hard about building complete and eliminating legacy hardware (plain PCI, IDE, etc.) or you might end up with a bunch of obsolete hardware and no upgrade path a lot sooner than you expect.

QUIET! wrote:You might look for a GeForce FX 5900 agp card.

That won't offer hardware encoding/decoding of video. Only Geforce 6 and later do plus there's no need for gaming here so a bottom of the range card would be best for keeping power draw down. I wouldn't pay any real money for one though, it would only be worth spare change.