I'm looking at 3650s and 3450s, but can't really afford them. My budget is preferably less than 25GBP. Can anyone help?

Neither of those cards are worth getting. 3850 or 4650 are the only options worth getting for the AGP bus. And even then it's a waste, cause the CPU will probably bottleneck your system anyway. So it's not even worth upgrading.

I have a Celeron D 3.33gHz. Surely this is a good CPU for LFS? It is quite fast and LFS doesn't make use of multi-cores does it? I forgot to mention - it needs to be good for LFS and LFS recording. I only really play SLRR and LFS .

GeForce 7600GS

lol celeron is garbage, clock speed is not the only important thing. celeron has a very small amount of cache, which severely limits it's performance. ANYTHING is better than a celeron. so yea, it's your cpu that's limiting your computer, not your video card. if you should upgrade anything, it should be your cpu.

Celeron Ds are totally different to the Celerons BTW. Celeron D is a budget brand, Celerons were rebranded P3s. D356.

Ummm actually they're not different at all, they are the same. Celeron D is a dual-core Celeron. They can rebrand them all they want, a Celeron will always be a Celeron. The D356 has 0.5 MB of cache, which is a pathetic amount, barely enough to run a decent game. My Core 2 Duo E8400 has 6MB of cache, and 3GHz clock speed, and is a much much faster cpu. Clock speed is meaningless if the cpu is continually retrieving instructions from memory (rather than from the [much faster] cache) because the cache is too small to store the most frequently used instructions, thus that 3.33 GHz spends most of it's time waiting (sleeping). Put in a real cpu in your system and you will notice a huge improvement.

Quote from shiny_red_cobra :

Ummm actually they're not different at all, they are the same. Celeron D is a dual-core Celeron. They can rebrand them all they want, a Celeron will always be a Celeron. The D356 has 0.5 MB of cache, which is a pathetic amount, barely enough to run a decent game. My Core 2 Duo E8400 has 6MB of cache, and 3GHz clock speed, and is a much much faster cpu. Clock speed is meaningless if the cpu is continually retrieving instructions from memory (rather than from the [much faster] cache) because the cache is too small to store the most frequently used instructions, thus that 3.33 GHz spends most of it's time waiting (sleeping). Put in a real cpu in your system and you will notice a huge improvement.

Well to correct you, the Celeron D's aint dual-core. Tho i agree to all the other. The only thing you can have a Celeron for, is work. Like writing, surfing the web and such. Other then that the cache is too small.

Wow I hadn't noticed it's not a dual core. Wow...what a piece of shit cpu, it's even worse than I thought. Why does it have D in the name then? Wow...

Quote from shiny_red_cobra :

Wow I hadn't noticed it's not a dual core. Wow...what a piece of shit cpu, it's even worse than I thought. Why does it have D in the name then? Wow...

TBCH, i have NO idea whatsoever.. I cant think of a good reason to call it Celeron "D" if the "D" dont stand for DUAL/DUAL-CORE or whatever.. Strange as hell

Tho it completely makes sense when u think of it (celeron d being a singlecore without HT), its for workstations, should use very little power, and doesnt need to handle high res or anything.. its just for those fancy typewriters

EDIT: 3x "WOW" in a post.. record?

I have an 8 year old machine with a pentium 4 2.53 ghz cpu, and i went for an ati hd2600 pro as i saw one cheap on ebay with no bids, i got it for £31 about 18 months ago, and with lynces hi res textures, running aa/af at 4x and a 1024x768 32 bit res i can achieve about 80 fps on my own on most tracks and ~45 fps online, which isnt the best in the world, but fit for purpose on this old rig, but i do get the odd t1 fps dive where it all goes a bit slide show like gameplay, but thats the cpu causing that as it maxes out at 100% in that situation.

used 6600GT

Quote from Feffe85 :

TBCH, i have NO idea whatsoever.. I cant think of a good reason to call it Celeron "D" if the "D" dont stand for DUAL/DUAL-CORE or whatever.. Strange as hell

Could stand for Desktop, since the M in Celeron M stands for mobile IIRC, and it's only used in laptops.

EDIT: I just noticed I bumped this topic, nevermind :X

BUMP: Decided. Going for a X1950Pro and already bought a SB0570 sound card.