To upgrade or not: 9800 ro to a 7800 GS

Hi All,

Doing some research to see if this is a viable option right now, hopefully to get me through another year or so.

This is my current setup:

MSI K8Neo Platinum MB
AMD 64 Socket 754 2800+
base 350W Aopen PSU (But have a Antec True Control 2.0 550 watt PSU I can install)
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB AGP
1.5 GB Crucial Memory
Dell 2005FPW 20.1 Wide Aspect LCD
Hitachi Deskstar 18GB Drive
SOny CD-RW
Aopen DVD/CD-RW

Would it be worth it to upgrade the GPU at this point? I currently play Battlefiled 2, Call of Cthulu, Battle for Middle Earth II. Any other suggestions for a AGP based that might eek out some additional performance and worth the cost? Also, from a real world perspective, how much of a "noticeable" difference would there be in game play?

Looks like the card funs for $280-300. I'd like to upgrade to PCI-E, but know there aren't any options to move an AMD 754 to PCI-E. This would probably be the limit of my budget right now fo computer components, maybe slightly higher.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

Jim

You could get that ASRock board with the riser for S754, it gives you the option to upgrade to 939 also. I'm not sure if it's compatible with the AM2 riser, that would be a real boon.

It should be at least 2x faster in general on anything that's not CPU-limited, and up to about 5x faster in shader-heavy benchmarks. If that's worth the cost to you, then buy it .

Personally I wouldn't see any point in throwing your system away to switch to PCI-Express now when there's Vista, DX10 and a host of other new technologies coming out in the next year... why pay all that money now when it may be obsolete in nine months anyway?

It might also worth your while to look into prices for X800/850XT

I'm one of the few agp whores around. still slanging 462, I can run BF2 nicely on medium.

3200 xp
BF 7800 GS
2 gig 3200 ram
msi nfoce2 ultra


....going to buy a second computer w/ 939 in a year or so

well think of it this way, you will get a boost from this card, cause the 9800 isn't as badass, but on the other hand do you need the extra performance gain? as for what i run the game at it's at medium all the way at 800x600 (I haven't taken the time to figure out how nice i can make it, I'm just happy to play it at a nice rate) there should be some kind of alternate menu system for that game, I think the menu takes up enough load time!