Upgrade Question?

[ozcot]

I have an Alienware Area-51 with a Abit AA8XE 925XE MB, 2 gigs ram, and a 7600 GT with 256 Ram. I am thinking of upgrading my video board to a "MSI NX8800GT 512M OC GeForce 8800GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card" and also adding "Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory" for a total of 4 gigs of ram all for $260 delivered. How much of a speed diffrence will I see? Will it be worth the price? I mostly play RPG's Everquest 2, The Witcher etc... Thanks for any info..

 

[outlw6669]

You should see a definite increase in your speed from the GPU.
Probably not to much from the RAM, upgrade though.

You should really consider upgrading your whole system as you are very limited by your P4 CPU.
The latest GPU needs a Core 2 running at least 2.6GHz to reach max performance.
Unfortunately, your Mb dose not support the newer Core 2 architecture.
As the top end dual core P4 is slower than a lower end Core 2 you are sorta SOL with your MB...

Processor
- Supports Socket 775 for Intel® Pentium 4 / Pentium 4 EE / Pentium XE / Celeron D processors
- Supports 1066/800MHz FSB
- Supports Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology

Abit Product Page

However, games are not 100% dependent on the graphics card; the Geforce 8 and 9 require a basic level of power, otherwise they are unable to exploit their 3D potential. The speed of the CPU should lie somewhere between 2600 and 3000 MHz; any lower, and the new graphics chips lose considerable performance.

Recent THG article


Edit:

Please note that 2.6-3-0GHz refers to Core 2 speeds.
Your P4 is much slower than it's clocks compared to any current Intel CPU.