Best Upgrade?? More Ram? Corssfire? Or?

[shadowknight86]

Old system I picked up from a friend for $160 when my laptop died. Short on the $ so what my best upgrade:

OS: Vista Ultimate - 64Bit
Mobo: Asus P5AD2-E Premium
HD: Maxtor 6L100P0 ATA (100gb HD)
RAM: Corsair XMS DDR2 400mhz (2gb total)
VCard: ATI Radeon HD 3800 (512mb)


lol not exactly a great gamign system as its parts are wut 2006/2007ish. But for a couple bucks what would be my best bet? Looking to spend under $100, less is more! Oh BTW trying to get the upgrade to play AION a bit more smoother.. Which i should alreadybe doing with ym spec but idk meh lol.
"Recommended System Specifications::

Microsoft Windows XP SP2 / Vista
*Dual Core CPU 2.0GHz or equivalent
2GB RAM
NVIDIA 6800 with 256MB RAM / ATI x800 with 256MB or higher "

I'm thinking 2bg more of RAM cus Vista + Video card drains out soo much of it already lol. Can I mix speeds/sizes like this and be ok? this looks like pretty cheap for 2bg of Corsair.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145201


Or would grabbing a cheap 2nd ATI 512 card and crossfireing it work better?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102821

 

[dndhatcher]

What CPU is in that computer?
I dont see a Radeon 3800 listed anywhere, is it a 3850?
What screen resolution do you have?
Have you set aions graphics settings to minimum? does that help?
Are you playing in DX9 not DX10? does that help?
Does turning off Antialiasing help?

 

[fatkid35]

for a hundred bucks the best thing you could do for gaming is buy a ati 4850 1 gig ddr3. or an ati 4670 1 gig ddr3 for 75 bucks and craigslist for some more ramm.

 

[shadowknight86]

Res i can change it around doesnt make must diff between say 800x600 (ugly) and my norm 1224-768. Wow didnt put CPU lul Pent d 930 Duo Core 3.0GHZ (not OC).

Na its teh ATI HD 3800.. its a few years old they dont support anything under 3850 these days i think.

On lowest setting it help but not much, even when there jsut a few ppl near me lag spikes.

Running it on Dx10, with AA off and lighting off and low setting etc.

So with the VideoCard wont more Videocard ram = more that it steals from the system? ATM my 512 card steals wut like 768ish.. might look on Clist for ram its pretty cheap new... there issues with diff speeds/ddr2/3 or will windows jsut suto set the ram speeds tot he lowest on the system to match... cus the 400mhz ddr2 i have is meh these days lol

 

[dndhatcher]

Unfortunately Pentium D is the worst possible dual core CPU.

Try running DX9, DX1- tends to be slower.

Under vista 64 your graphics card should not steal any of your system RAM. Vista itself takes up over 1GB RAM though. Its a bloated mess of an OS and really should not have been installed on older hardware like yours.

Upgrading to windows 7 might help, it seems to be more efficient than vista. Another option would be falling back to XP, which would also run your computer faster.