a bottleneck?

hallo all,
need a bit of advice on the following - getting HL2 and a 9800 pro for xmas (hoorah!) ...however..... my current set up is this...
P4 2.2
512 pc2100 (1 gig when i've got the £)
fc 5600 (cya)
psu = 200w

now to fit the 9800 pro I need a new power supply (300w+) ...which in turn means i need a new case ( got wierd non-standard HP case with strange small psu) - ok so far - but starting to get a bit expensive for 1 (great) game ..what I can't do is upgrade the CPU (according to HP) so i'm stuck with my 2.2 gigs which by todays standard seems old and slow - so - my question is this...am i going to get a big bottleneck from my cpu not keeping up with the gfx card? I remember reading an article saying that HL2 is very cpu power hungry and the slowest they reviewed was a P4 2.4! (i've only got AGPX4 also) ...so am I going to get any decent benefits from the fastish card with the slow cpu?

lastly...if I decided to jump into the upgrading route a bit further - to get a faster cpu do i just need to upgrade just the motherboard or anything else? - and for someone who looks inside the PC and thinks "ooooh what a lot of wires..." is this going to be a bit of a nightmare...
any thought appreciated..
cheers
Dunk [UK]

HL2 will run fine on your rig when you get the 9800 Pro, don't worry about it. What motherboard are we talking about?

Edit/
As a matter of fact, HL2 will probably run fine on your current setup. Performance will however increase with the 9800 Pro. Your cpu is indeed getting slow compared to what's on the market these days. But not extremely slow.

thanks for quick reply..

well yes the HL2 demo runs 'ok' at 1024X768 (FPS range from 16-100+) but seen it on high end rig and it really is a world of difference graphically and without the slowdowns. So I guess I'll just wait and see how it turns out on the 9800 pro with current system...

my current motherboard is FIC VI31 which doesn't handle a CPU faster than P4 2.2 apparently...

Dunk

I don't know much about Intel, but yeah, when upgrading, you'll probably have to buy a new motherboard along with new RAM (pc2100 isn't fast enough for the newest cpu's, so you won't be able to recycle your old stick of RAM) and ofcourse the new cpu. So that would be quite an investment....

Apart from the CD Rom drive and the HD there's nothing left

If you need to start changing this amount of kit in your rig, then it's time for a full P.C. upgrade (Not from P.C World)

All I would do with that rig at the moment would be adding some RAM and indeed equip it with something like a Radeon 9800 PRO, I probably won't be thinking of completely replacing it yet, it still does quite well!

Originally posted by [mOo]DooM@Dec 25 2004, 12:47 AM
All I would do with that rig at the moment would be adding some RAM and indeed equip it with something like a Radeon 9800 PRO, I probably won't be thinking of completely replacing it yet, it still does quite well!

If you read the top post, you would have realised that he can't get a 9800pro in unless he changes his PSU. To do this he needs a bigger case............see where this is going