Is CPU bottleneck, or is it worth upgrading vid card?

I have an Athlon XP 1800+ (running at the stock 1533 mhz or whatever it is)
I have a Radeon 9800 (non-pro).


I'm just wondering if I will see substantial gains in speed by going to something like an ATI X800 XL, or a 6600 GT? (They can be had for around $75 now...)

Or is the CPU simply going to be a bottleneck?

I could get a 2600+ cpu for $40 - is that going to make much difference?



I have a Socket A mobo, and can't afford to upgrade much else other than an el-cheapo cpu and/or video card.

Thanks.

How much RAM do you have? Having at least 1GB RAM would be a good idea too.

I think the cpu upgrade would be the first thing, especially at that price. After that would come the ram upgrade, and then the video card. I think the X800 XL would be better than the 6600 GT.

You're not going to get stellar performance out of your computer, its just too old. You probably realize that already. At the same time, you can improve it a lot. Years ago, I went from a 1800+ to a 2700+ and I installed a 9800 Pro in my old computer and the performance went up about four fold, so if you're on a tight budget, its worth the effort.

Your CPU would bottleneck the hell out of an X800XL; try overclocking, of just upgrading the CPU altogether.

Yes it will bottleneck big time.

Get a new mobo sock 939 (pci express) and an athlon64 3000 then oc it to 2.4. This way you can keep the DDR ram you already have.
You can get a really cheap mobo with nforce4 from gigabyte.

There isnt really a point in buying agp cards any more.
Save some money and go this way.
You wont be able to run any newer games like oblivion with that proc.