Recommended Upgrades

[senzer]

I usually get 100+ FPS in most of the time in Counter Strike: Source, although sometimes it does drop to < 60, and I'm going to buy some newer more demanding games pretty soon, so anyway what do you guys recommend I upgrade from my current rig, without going completely mad and breaking the bank, just so I can run all of the latest games (dx.10 etc) comfortably.

My specs:

ASRock ConRoeXFire-eSATA2
Intel E6600 Core2 Duo 2.4GHz
Radeon X1900XT 512mb
2GB Kingston 667MHz
2 x 250GB SATA 7200rpm
550Watt PSU

Any advice appreciated.

 

[Onus]

An HD4850 GPU will give you a nice boost. That's six tiers higher on Cleeve's list, and just three supposedly makes a visible difference.
Assuming that PSU is a decent brand, it is powerful enough for the new GPU.

 

[njalterio]

2GB more of RAM wouldn't be bad either. It's very cheap now.

 

[dirtmountain]

Agree with jtt, a HD4850 (about $170 after rebate) is the best bang for the buck for your system. Next choice for me would be a HD4870 (about $300) it only gets about 20% higher performance then the 4850 though.

 

[aevm]

1. HD 4850
2. more RAM
3. a cooler for the CPU and overclock it a bit
4. a newer and faster hard disk with PMR (Seagate 7200.11 500GB, WD 640GB)

 

[gaiden]

1. x1900xt would sell for at least $70 (hopefully) with that in mind you'll be only spending $100 to get the cheapest 4850 on the market.
2. if you want to upgrade some more i would suggest a better cpu with a decent cooler.
3. beyond that would be more RAM

gl

 

[sanjiwatsuki]

I agree with the HD4850.
2GB of RAM is a cheap upgrade, though. I'd only do it if you need to, though. I haven't ever seen myself use over 80% RAM on my 2GB system. =)