My dillema (upgrade time)

[Nickrand]

I want to upgrade mainly for Age of Empires 3 which comes out October 4th. You see in the topic summary my current equipment. My dillema is: I'd rather not start all over (i.e. new cpu, mobo, gpu). If I could put a solid upgrade AGP card in that would be great. Otherwise, can I stay with socket 754 and go to pcie for cheap (what mobo, gpu would recommend if that was your choice)?

Thanks in advance

 

[Nardo]

Well, I would personally recommend this:

ASUS K8N4-E DELUXE Socket 754 ($114 shipped)
&
eVGA 256-P2-N376-AX Geforce 6800GT 256MB ($345 shipped)

or

eVGA GeForce 6800 Non-Ultra (and hope you get one with working extra pipes) for $190 shipped

That's my two cents (all prices from NewEgg)

 

[Nardo]

That 6800 is for the AGP setup you got now, BTW.

 

[Grimbor]

If your updating specifically for AoEIII then wait until the game is released and more info is available on benchmarks within it. Not only will card prices be less, but if ATIs next gen hits market by then, prices will be much lower and options will likely be higher. I kind of suspect that in a game like AoEIII, you won't get much of a noticeable difference between your 5900XT and a 6800GT unless your running at 1600X1200 or higher. Make sure you have 1 gig of system ram first at least, that will be more important then anything else.

 

[BillyBobJoel71]

6800gt or the radeon x800xl is your best bet.

 

[Icepick]

Originally posted by: SuperTyphoon
6800gt or the radeon x800xl is your best bet.

Upgrading to either of these cards is a sound decision. Just buy whichever you can get for the least amount of money at the time. Both perform similarly.

 

[Nickrand]

has it been confirmed that 7800 GT will not be on AGP?

 

[SGtheArtist]

I believe you would most likely see the greatest performance difference by upgrading your graphics card.

However, I agree with Grimbor > depending upon the game an increase in RAM to 1GB maybe a better choice as your current graphics card may be able to run the game fine.

I'd wait and see what the reviews & games say about the game before investing. Especially since you want to minimize your cost, but specifically want the performance gains for that specific game.

Just my 2 cents.