[jasonb885]

Originally Posted by Woof1701

Until a few weeks ago I played with an Athlon XP 2000+ with a GeForce 4200 Ti card and 512 Mb Ram. It worked, but not overly well so. When encountering heavy traffic like with Rubinis Traffic Mod or a large convoy FPS sank below 15 FPS making the aiming a game of chance. In addition the FPS lag in time compression made playing above 512 practically impossible. I was playing at lowest quality possible. Vsync and AA (antialising) off, mipmaps and allow other stuff toned to lowest settings.

Been there. That was basically my system. I picked up the Ti4200 on Ebay for $49 this Spring. Amazing card. It's only finally on its way out just now.

Originally Posted by Woof1701

I then tried to upgrade the video card (6600GT), and it gave me some more FPS in traffic and convoy. I could even switch on AA and some other stuff. The addon memory I also purchased decreased the loading times somewhat, but in my opinion had the least effect on game play. I then got lucky and stumbled upon a new Athlon XP 3000+ FBS266 and a very affordable Asus board, so I decided to invest and sell the old parts.

I'm sorry.

I almost did the same thing, but someone saved me first. Socket A is dead technology. For the same price as a nice, new (AMD doesn't make them anymore) XP 3000+ CPU, you can buy a Sempron 64-bit CPU for a Socket 754 board. Or, if you want to future proof yourself into the future, get a Socket 939 board and go Athlon 64 939. (But don't buy the overpriced Athlon 64 CPUs for Socket 754!)

I compared the prices and for $300, including new PSU (quality CoolMax), 1GB PC3200 (cheap brand, slow timings), Biostar Socket 754 NForce3, and Sempron 2800+ 64-bit, plus a cheapy case, was only slightly more expensive than buying a new ASUS Delux 7XVwhatever and an extremely expensive Athlon 32-bit XP 3000+.

It wasn't worth it unless I got an Athlon XP that did PC3200/FSB200MHz and that was going to be expensive.

Originally Posted by Woof1701

As with the graphics card, this gave me a big boost. The best thing about it was the fact, that I could now play in 2048 TC and still be at 60 FPS. Frame rates even in very densly populated harbors normally do not fall below 30 and I have no problems with large convoys whatsoever.

Absolutely. The limiting factor with SH3, even if you have a tried and true Ti series card, is the memory/CPU I/O interconnect. You bumped up your FSB and that greatly increased your performance.

Originally Posted by Woof1701

From my understanding I would say that all the ships movements in TC are calculated by the CPU and thus with an Athlon 1.3 you're massivly too low for that, since my XP 2000+ didn't really manage to cope with that. (and I remember my last upgrade from an Athlon 1400 to have been a major advancement in gameplay already.) A better graphics card may help you a little when it comes to graphics, but ultimately I'd not expect too much of that.

Agreed.

Originally Posted by Woof1701

If you're lucky and can get yourself an "old" Athlon XP 3000+ or even 3200+ and a cheap but quality Socket A board for it and can afford a nice graphics card it will suffice for quite a while, but like myself you would be standing at the same point in one to two years with the next game that won't run properly .

If you haven't made your purchase yet, seriously consider either AMD's Socket 754 or AMD's Socket 939 options. 939 will cost you about $125 for the least expensive CPU and about $60 for a mainboard, but it's solid into the future. You'll likely get a board with PCI-E/PCIe, so expect to have to upgrade your AGP video card, too. You may need a new PSU if upgrading to a 6800GT, though.

Meanwhile, Socket 754 is the new value Sempron platform. You can still pick up NForce3 based mainboards for about $50 starting, and the Sempron 64-bit 2800+ was only $76 when I bought it. It has less of a future than 939, but if you don't want to spend a lot it's a cheaper solution and it now buys you 64-bit, too. (Of course, unless you run, say, Linux or FreeBSD, 64-bit Windows does _not_ get you much of squat. Plus, from what I hear SF doesn't work on 64-bit Windows yet anyway. So no SH3 for you.)

But, seriously, don't do anything with your old Socket A system. It's not worth the investment. This comes from someone that tried to make a Socket A system upgrade work from every mathematical angle, failed, and finally decided Socket 754 was an inexpensive upgrade solution that still has a future.