FutureMark release 3dmark2003

[TeaLeaf]

As for the ram - it'll help reduce load times and also speed up some memory transfers. I've had the little yellow warning trianges concerning memory a few times with bf1942. I would love to outfit my pc with all the bits it needs, but I'll start with the ram.

Your motherboard will take up to an Athlon 1.4Mhz Thunderbird and if you want to crank even more out of that chip, you should be able to overclock it to 1.5Mhz with a decent heatsink and fan without too much in the way of risk.  T-birds overclock well and the procedure is easy and well documented on the net.

A spare £30 will get you a 1.4 T-bird and a spare 5 minutes should see it installed.  Assuming you are not getting a new mobo in the near future, then I would suggest that this would be the best way to get a quick performance boost from your system at minimum cost and it will certainly beat the RAM upgrade for the moment.

If you have the later version of that mobo you could go for an even faster XP processor.....

Looking at those vga charts I'd say its not worth my while going any higher than, say, a radeon 8500 or geforce3 due to the limit imposed by the cpu after that. I realise it's game dependant to some degree, but I'm sure theres a trend. Hopefully I'll have the cash to refit my pc in a few months.

Be careful here.  At some point down the road you are going to want to upgrade the mobo and the CPU again.  I would go for something that is old enough to have dropped in price some considerable way, but not so old that it is falling behind in terms of performance.  For me, this card Connect3D RADEONâ,,¢ 9500 PRO + VGA DVI-I & Tv-out - AGP 8x falls into that category at £124 + VAT.  Much less than that at the upgrade bug will come round all too quickly again and you'll end up spending a second lot of cash on another new graphics card  8O

Just my 2 cents.

TL.