First off, let's get the embarrassing part out of the way..my computer specs are as follows:

P4 2.66Ghz (Northwood 533Mhz FSB)
1GB PC2700
Radeon 9800 Pro

I'm contemplating whether or not it'll be worth upgrading the video card to one of the following:

Geforce 7600GS (Cheapest)
Radeon HD2600PRO
Geforce 7600GT (Most expensive)

Those are pretty much the only AGP cards available to me at my local stores. I play WoW and HL2/CSS/TF2 mostly. On WoW I get 40-50FPS for less populated areas and i dip down to 20-30FPS (ouch!) for the most part. As for CSS, it plays fine usually but it could use some extra frames here and there. TF2 is straight out ugly...playable but low FPS and at low settings too.
As a side note, I'm probably adding an extra 512MB or 1GB of RAM but I doubt it's the RAM that's affecting my WoW gameplay; though it might help TF2.

I've been looking into the whole bottlenecking bit but hardly found an answer. I'm thinking of getting the 7600GT but afraid it'll be wasted cause of the CPU. The 7600GS is way cheaper but if my system can make use of the HD2600PRO or 7600GT I'd rather get those. I don't know what to do
Thanks for the help!

Your CPU is a little slower than mine (3.06GHz Northwood), but going from a 9500 Pro to 7800GS gave about a 6x improvement in 3DMark2006 and trebled the Source stress test frame-rate in HL2. So I'd imagine that any of those cards should be a sizeable improvement; the only real question is whether you'd be better off spending a bit more to upgrade the entire system.

But from what you're saying..if I were to upgrade my video card I'll most definitely see huge improvements?

Good question indeed. The video cards I listed range from $80-$130 so it isn't too much of an investment plus I doubt I will be buying a new system any time soon. It all comes down to Starcraft II . How does the 7800GS compare to the 7600GT though? It's not listed on TH's 2007 VGA list.

off topic nostalgia -

Man, I remember when a 9800 Pro and a P4 were the best you could get. And a gig of RAM to boot, no less.

I think 7600 GT and 7800 GS are pretty close in real world performance.

Correct. The 7800GS and 7600GT are pretty close to each other. If I were you, I'd get the 7600GS. It's probably a cheap upgrade, and should fit nicely with your system. Anything more exotic would probably require a PSU upgrade anyways...

Yeah, the benchmarks I've seen put the 7800GS and 7600GT pretty close; from what I remember they have a similar number of pipelines but the 7600GT has a lower memory bandwidth, so you'll probably see the 7600GT drop lower at high resolutions or with AA.

Thanks for the advice everyone. As for the PSU, I'm pretty sure I have a sufficient PSU...mine old one died a while back and so I bought a new one and definitely overdid it as I got a Fortron 500W supply.

So with the PSU out of the way, do you think my CPU will cause bottlenecking if I got the 7600GT? or should i stick with the 7600GS?

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/0 [...] rd_for_115


it recommends x1650 pro or hd2600xt. 7600gt should be sufficent though. also watch out for lesser known brands they might be cheaper but most have a faulty pci-e to agp bridge.

Yea I checked that thread, unfortunately the HD2600XT is not available at my local PC stores and I do not want to wait for one to get shipped to me. the X1650 Pro is available but goes for $130 which is the same price as the 7600GT; correct me if I'm wrong, but the 7600GT is more powerful than the X1650 Pro so I'd rather get that instead.

Actually if you can spare a bit more TigerDirect has the ATI Radeon X1950Pro for a bit more but it will be better for your performance even though it has half the memory since it has a 256bit memory bus instead of 128bit.

You can check Toms VGA charts and see that any of the X1900 series is much better than the ones you are looking at. Even a X800 series would be better since they have a wider memory bus. Look for 256bit memory bus to get ther best performance results in an upgrade.

I would be spending quite a bit more. Tigerdirect has the X1950PRO for $231CDN and shipping would be another $20-30 whereas the 7600GT is only $120, half the price plus I don't have to wait . Thanks anyways

Yea thats too bad since the 128bit bus will limit you quite a bit. Even with 2x the memiory the bus will limit the memory bandwidth. But get what you can for a good price and hopefully it helps your gaming a bit.

Another quickie..does the 7600GS wtfpwnz0r the 9800PRO? If it does then I think I will settle with that as it's only $80. I only really play a couple of older games which my 9800PRO handles but not too well.

Yea it probably is since the 9800 series was made to compete with NVidias 5900 series. The 7 series went up againste the X1900 series.

So get it and game on.

Alright! Thanks everyone for all the help...looks like it's the 7600GS for me!!!