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Hi
I use my PC mainly for games. I was thinking of upgrading but not sure which is better upgrading my graphics card to an X1950pro/X1950XT or upgrading my CPU. Where would the bottleneck in my system be at the moment?
Current system
CPU: amd64 3500+
Motherboard: Nforce 4 ultra
Graphics: Nvidia 7800gt
Ram: 1gb
I'd personally suggest a CPU upgrade and also an extra 1GB of memory.
I would suggest on getting a new CPU and some more memory :thumbsup:
The graphics card can wait for the time being, unless you sell it then you could get a new one :confused:
Just upgrade the ram.
Your CPU and GFX card are plenty good enough at the moment.
Then later you'll probably need to upgrade both CPU and GFX card - the GFX card will give you a better benefit, but it's not a large step from a 7800gt. Upgrading the CPU will do nothing for games at the moment.
Going to 2gig will give you a noticeable improvement with recent games.
Changing the CPU to a dual core model would make some difference, but not as much as with the ram.
Upgrading the graphics is not really worth it at the moment, as you would notice more improvement by upgrading the ram or CPU.
Sell your current ram, and 3500+. Grab a 3800+ X2, and 2x1GB kit of ram, and overclock the chip, should get 2.5Ghz.
For gaming the extra 1G of ram will be the most important. Some games I tested with a 7800GT wouldn't run at all with 1GB RAM only - 2G was needed.
For general use (not gaming specific), then upgrade the CPU to dual core.
Then maybe you could upgrade graphics, but Id wait until you can afford a dx10 card for it to be worthwhile - 7800gt is a good card.
As everyone else has said, you need more RAM, going up to 2GB will make a LOT of games run better while upgrading the GPU will only make a lot of difference if it's really struggling (i.e. 15FPS in games at the res youre running), tbh the 7800GT while being fairly worthless now is still a nice card.
If I were you I'd hold onto it until the DX10 midrange video cards come out and get one of those, then the performance difference will be worth it.
The CPU isn't quite so important in my opinion, Dual Core is nice but the A64 single core isnt so bad that it would be really slowing down games.