Upgrade advice.

[magnumty]

I am currently running a athlon x2 4200 socket 939, 7900GS 256mb, 2 gig of value ram and Windows xp. I am thinking of upgrading to a 8800gts, but I'm afraid my cpu will be a huge bottleneck. I want to run crysis, gears of war, and ut3 on my pc. Should I go for the 8800gts, or upgrade the cpu to a core 2? I dont have enough cash to do both, so any advice would be appreciated.. thanks..

 

[myocardia]

This one's easy. Upgrade to an 8800GTS, and overclock your 4200 to 2.5-2.6 Ghz. It still won't be as fast as a C2D, but it should be fast enough.

 

[magnumty]

I'm not really an overclocker, if i'm not overclocking do u still have the same opinion?

 

[myocardia]

If you don't overclock, don't waste your money on an 8800GTS. It will be a waste. Just start saving your money for a completely new system, built around either an E6850, or a Q6600.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

Let's suppose that the CPU does bottleneck the video card some. Wouldn't a bottlenecked 8800 GTS still be faster than, say, a bottlenecked 7900 GTX or a bottlenecked x1800xt?

The CPU might slow the card down somewhat, but given a given CPU, wouldn't a bottlenecked faster card still be faster than a bottlenecked slower card?

 

[JustaGeek]

I agree.

I was running the 2.6GHz P4 w/ HT Northwood with NVidia MX440 AGP 8x, upgraded to 6800NU 128MB, then 7800GS 256MB.

There was a significant improvement each time, without any signs of bottlenecking.

OP - go for it and upgrade your Video Card. Or better yet - wait for the new GPU's expected in November.

Good luck!

 

[5t3v0]

I had a S939 X2 4200+ (overclocked to 2.5GHz) with this GTS before I upgraded to my current system. While the CPU was certainly a bottleneck in some games, they were all still playable at the 1280x1024 res of my lcd. There weren't any games I couldn't play at native res with high detail settings enabled. Moving to the C2D has certainly increased the fps; from 50 f/s to 200 f/s in the lost coast demo; but above the monitor refresh rate, it's of little value. I definitely recommend the card upgrade before the cpu if your budget is tight.