Help with gaming pc upgrade

[techno79]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi. Can someone please help me with my PC upgrade. About a year or two ago I created a gaming PC with the following spec:

AMD 64 3800+ (Venice) CPU socket 939
1GB RAM
Gigabyte SLI motherboard (GA-K8N-SLI)
Gigabyte Geforce 7800 GTX
IDE hard disk (not quite sure which one probably 7200rpm)
I have a 19" LCD monitor with a res of 1280 x 1024.

Although I can run games like Doom 3 at a playable rate, I find that it is no where near the figures that test reviews give. I also play World of Warcraft and often find my frame drops to 30fps quite frequently.

I prefer to keep things on high graphics details where possible (about 4 x AA). What would be the best thing for me to upgrade to increase performance? Will changing to an X2 CPU help? What about adding more memory. Although I could add another 7800GTX, this is an expensive upgrade and may not give benefits as the current bottleneck is else where. I want to get the biggest gains for money spent. Any help will be greately appreciated.

TIA

 

[apt403]

First of all, how much are you looking to spend? If you want better frames then the gfx card is what you should upgrade.

 

[techno79]

First of all, how much are you looking to spend? If you want better frames then the gfx card is what you should upgrade.

About £100 to £150 is about what I want to spend. What makes you think the graphics card needs changing? It was the fastest card on the market when I bought it and I invested in the SLI solution to allow room for more performance. I thought the rest of the system e.g. CPU would be the bottleneck of the graphics card?

 

[f1nal_0men]

What I would recommend is try and sell your motherboard + cpu + memory for as much as you can. Let's assume you get another £100.

I would get this motherboard, this processor, and this memory. This way you can just add another 1gb stick later. No need to replace your videocard unless you decide to go DX10. And right now thats quite expensive.

 

[JAYDEEJOHN]

Ok,heres my rig :3700+ 1 gig mem 1900xt 512 VERY similar to yours.The main difference is the gfx card.I can run oblivion with almost all the eye candy at 1280 1024...get a better gfx card,Thats your bottleneck here