Graphics card advice please :)

[acidrainy]

Yes the new version of the NF7-S do have the 4 mounting holes

V1.2 and up-wards iirc...?

[Axion]

personally id say get the ram+mobo first... which should cost about £160

then get the 9800pro (it will drop in price more than the other two and it will be so heavily limited by your current setup you wont notice huge gains either)

[Spritzup]

I agree with Axion, get the motherboard and the ram first, and then get the card. It should drop at or around September 30 (the expected release date of Half Life 2). Just my 2 cents

[Byatt]

whoa.

if you've got £350, I'd be tempted to advice this:

get an nf7-s - your current board isn't a huge bottleneck, but, well, it will be as soon as you want to move up to ddr400 (or higher, if you're planning to REALLY push that dlt3c)...

I'd then advise you grab a 9800 (pro or non-pro, your choice...personally I'd say the nonpro could probably be pushed close to pro performance, and £70 is a lot of money )

Presumably you've got a decentish 350W+ PSU ? If you haven't you might want to invest in one of these as well, 9800s are bliddy power hungry beasts.

From there...well, this is kind of the point, you can upgrade the memory, the processor, you can overclock them to buggery, etc. I wouldn't worry too much about rushing to get quicker memory just yet - your main bottleneck is your gfx card, and ddr is really pricey at the moment

I'd say gfx prices will more likely rise on the arrival of HL2, surely? Unless both ati AND nvidia are planning to release their next card somewhere around that date?

[Spritzup]

I've heard that ATI is planning on releasing it's new flagship at the release of HL2. This should drop the price of the rest of there line up.

[vortigern_red]

Do people really think hes going to see the same performance increase in Halo by upgrading his Mainboard and ram as by just sticking a radeon 9800 pro in his machine!

"yea before i was getting 30FPS, now Ive upgraded my Mboard and ram Im getting 35FPS!!! WOW"

or

"hey before I was getting 30FPS now Ive upgraded my GF3ti200 to a radeon 9800 Im getting 90FPS"

I suggest buying the 9800 non pro overclocking it to pro speeds (not that much of a risk, core anyway) saving the £150 and putting it towards an nforce2 and some RAM later when you can afford 1 gig of DDR 400 or waiting for the Athlon64/FX.

In short you will see a big games performace boost by upgrading your graphics card, or a small performance boost by upgrading your subsystem, or a great performance boost by upgrading both.

Don't upgrade both and get a 9600pro to save money, very short sighted, you will end up wishing you had bought the 9800 and waited to upgrade the rest.

[Shad]

Yeh that's why I intended to get the graphics card first; might decide I didn't need the rest.

However, new car is looking at costing slightly more than anticipated so I'll have to put this on hold for a few weeks

[kamz]

get a 9800np and clock it mannnnnnnnnn thats worth the money, only a few frames less then 9800pro...

and you save some money for future upgrades