Please help me upgrade!

[jonlee99]

What upgrade do you think will help me the most? I'm trying to play grand theft auto 4 and I can only get about 18fps with everything on low and resolution at 1280x800 and its driving me nuts! I'm most interested in improving the frame rate. I'd be happy with 30fps at 1440x900 resolution. Settings can stay at low and I'm fine with that. It still looks better than anything else I own.

My specs:
Compaq Presario SR5610F
Athlon X2 Dual Core 4800 2.5 ghz
3.0GB ram
32 bit Vista
EVGA 9500GT 512MB

My options as I see it:
Processor: Can I overclock this thing? Can I just replace it with an Athlon 64 X2 6000? I have an ECS Iris8 motherboard and I don't want to replace it.
Graphics card: I'm thinking a 1GB 9800GT would be my next logical upgrade in this department. Any opinions?

The consensus seems to be that the processor is vital to running this game. My graphics card is kinda weak to though so what do you think? I'm not a hardware guy so any help is appreciated!!!

JL

 

[Nik_I]

a video card upgrade would definitely help. i would recommend a 4850 1GB over the 9800GT. 1GB of video memory should help with GTAIV seeing how it needs to load fairly large amounts of textures at a time. but regardless of what you upgrade, don't expect amazing performance. the game is poorly designed and doesnt even run very well on my ps3.