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whats the fastest processor that our asus mobos will take?

got doom3 but cannot afford an AMD 64 system yet

our abit MBs can take XP 2400+ which run at 2 Ghz but only if its a specific type of chip (maybe a tbred B but don`t know off the top of my head and I`m in the middle of buttfuck nowwhere on a dialup connection just now) you see the thing is its not your chip which is stopping you from playing doom as much as your videocard and I`m afraid thats where the news gets worse the abit kt7 v.13 does not appear to have a 1.5v agp slot and unfortunately this means that you wont be able to run anything faster than a GFX 5200 or possibly a ATI 9200 (which is even weaker) and basically you`re just wasting your money mate. good news is you don`t need to splash out on a AMD 64, all you need is a new MB and chip where the MB meets AGP version 2.0 specification. bad news is they`re getting pricey as AMD 64s take over gotta go....

ok am back for a wee while (need to post a pic of my lodgings - the auberge of dreams) yeah i took a look at a graph of video card versus processor performance recently and basically it was all about your video card. this is why i tried to install a 9600 pro in my Abit MB (of course it didn`t work cos i don`t have 1.5v agp port). situation with the very latest cards (NV 6800; ATI X800) is that the cpu isn`t quite keeping up with the vga. however, it is my best guess that the best use of limited funds just now is as follows: buy the cheapest mobo-cpu combination which gives you a decent front side bus speed and AGv2. this will mean geting new memory but 512meg of fast ram is quite often a lot cheaper than 133SDRAM these days. Dont go bleading edge but try to get a 2700 (or greater) bandwidth memory and make sure you don`t settle for less than a nvidia 5900 Ultra or 128 MB ATI 9600 pro (XT is even better). If you can`t afford to say bye bye to SDRAM and get a half decent vga card then my advice is to wait. You don`t want to invest any more money in old (133 Mhz bus) technology. My GFX 5200 with 128Mb was an almost total waste of money. It doesn`t really allow me to do anything that a Geforce 2 64Mb wouldn`t. Spend a little time reading the reviews in Tom`s hardware guide and you`ll se what I mean. The ATI 9600 XT was a huge leap forward and the 9800 XT will do as much as you need just now. The Nividia 5950 should be good for doom 3 but not fantastic for farcry in terms of image quality although overall it is a kickass card and ubisoft are due to release a patch in any case. hope this helps. feel free to ask me more questions as am bursting with all this crap just now

well I "acquired" a GeForce 440 MX 64Mb and I can play Doom3 at Low Quality and its surprisingly ok but can get a little bit choppy and I would like to bump up the resolution to 800x600 so to do this I still need to buy a new mobo so I can put in a video card with 128Mb ?

my conclusion then, and you might not like this, is check out your hardware prices (try going to a geek shop with a fixed budget and tell them you wanna play doom3) but what might happen is that you end up having to buy a low end amd64 (or xp) system with 512 meg and no new video card. your case is good and you already upgraded your power supply (although you might have to again depending on which vga card you buy). its gonna be better to wait 2 months to buy the video card that can actually play your games than going half-arsed and spending money for no gain. You can add more memory later and upgrade the chip in 6 months time. for more specific advice i need access to your local reseller and some idea of your budget. good luck

can support comments about this card... a very tempting buy and with the low-k circuitry so fans don't have to blaze.

afraid so - sorry! really there`s not much you can do except assign your abit kt7 as a kickass server or CS 1.6 machine. certainly nothing you can put in your mobo is gonna give a huge increase over your mx 440. basically that machine is good for CS so I`d just leave it as is. am encouraged that doom3 runs on it though but am surprised that the resolution makes any difference. the mx 440 should be able to put 800x600 on the screen just as fast as 640x480. perhaps am missing something. (i get 60fps with 1600x1200 and 60fps with 1024x768 with CS1.6) anywho, I`m about to put together a budget machine for a guy I know in exchange for some building services so within the next few days I`ll have a much better idea of what is the most bang for very little bucks. bear with me, we`ll get through this