Upgrade or No?

[eedmond]

I currently have a AMD Athlon XP 3000 with 2gigs of DDR400 ram and a ATI Radeon 9800Pro.

I can come up with about $300 and was wondering if I should just upgrade my video card to a 7800GS (AGP). How much of a bottleneck will my CPU be? Or should I just save another $300 or so and buy a AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200? I am going with the 939 because I don't want to replace my ram.

It will take me probably 6 months to save another $300 though.

[BOB IROC]

I would say just go for the video card for right now because as many tests show a dual core CPU is not going to give you a substantial increase in game performance, but the X2 hasa 400Mhz clock speed difference too. Decisions.. Decisions.

[eedmond]

Check this out:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+

MSI 7207-090(K8NGM2-NBP) Under $300

Yes but then I wouldn't have any money for a new video card unless I waited 6 months to save it up. I know the price of mb's and cpu's.

[eedmond]

This MB has intergrated Graffics and you can add VC when funds are available.

http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p...2-NBP&class=mb

I dunno, did I say I wanted to downgrade my video or something? Integrated?!? I cannot believe you suggested I go with integrated video? Sorry but I don't think Oblivion, Vanguard, EQ2, Age of Conan will run on that integrated video or very well.

What are you gonna suggest next? I downgrade to a Pentium 2?

I mean MSI thinks the video sucks so bad they are scared to tell you what the video card is that's integrated. It says nothing but Integrated VGA.

[format c:]

Easy now, That board sports a pcie 16 x slot for a nice video card upgrade
Right now I think your present bottle neck is the agp bus , Right now AMD is changing from socket 939 to the AM2 and ddr 2 ram
Socket 939 will be with us for a while , Is your current cpu an athlon 64 or just an athlon, if it is a athlon 64, then get a good mobo with pcie 16 slots, toss your present cpu in there and a good pcie 16 video card and you will have a decent system
Currently I do not run dual core, Way too much money

[eedmond]

Easy now, That board sports a pcie 16 x slot for a nice video card upgrade
Right now I think your present bottle neck is the agp bus , Right now AMD is changing from socket 939 to the AM2 and ddr 2 ram
Socket 939 will be with us for a while , Is your current cpu an athlon 64 or just an athlon, if it is a athlon 64, then get a good mobo with pcie 16 slots, toss your present cpu in there and a good pcie 16 video card and you will have a decent system
Currently I do not run dual core, Way too much money

Far as I know AGP still hasn't hit it's bandwidth cap of what it can do. Realistically we don't need PCI-E yet but they upgraded it anyway to force people to upgrade.

It may have a nice PCI-E slot on it but I would be stuck buying the CPU and the MB and blow my $300 with no money left over for a video card so I would be stuck with onboard which is NOT an option.

Please re-read my OP to answer your cpu question.

[eedmond]

6150 may be faster clock speed but if it is in line with their standard 6x00 cards it would still be a downgrade. My Radeon 9800 Pro is better than a GF 6600.

You got any reviews of the 6150 compared to other standard desktop cards?

[slavedriver]

6150 may be faster clock speed but if it is in line with their standard 6x00 cards it would still be a downgrade. My Radeon 9800 Pro is better than a GF 6600.

You got any reviews of the 6150 compared to other standard desktop cards?

We got two pc's mine and my wifes one has the motherboard Daffy mentioned our other pc has GF 6600PCI-E and I've ran Far Cry, Doom3, and many other games and the preformance is pretty equal as I'm concerned and I'm sure both cards out preform any agp card.