I recently got an Ati Radeon 9600 XT from a friend and I bought hlife 2. I can only play it with most of the settings on low so it won’t slow down. My question is there a better card in the price range of 125-175$ or is there any safe tweaking or can I safely overclock(wich I’ve never done) the 9600 xt so I can get better performance until I can afford a highend card. Any links or tips to overclocking or tweaking cards would be appreciated.
Pentium 4 3.4 ghz
ECS 848p-a mobo
ATI Radeon 9600xt
1gb Crucial pc3200
80 gig Hard Drive
6600GT or the 6600 series would be best suited for you. though AGP is going out of style
Ninja’s right, the 6600 series is a very good value, though the 6600GT agp version won’t be in that price range. Overclocking won’t get you anymore than about 10% higher fps in HL2, you can still try it with powerstrip if you want, just move the sliders up a few notches, restart to test for stability, than edge it up a few more notches and repeat. Don’t push it too hard, 100MHz is probably as far as I’d recommend for the core and memory but this isn’t my field.