Upgrade

[llahood]

I am looking to upgrade my system and would like to get some ideas. My system is:
Asus M2R32-MVP Mobo
Athlon 64 X2 6400
4 Gb DDR 2 800
(2) Radeon 2900xt 512mb in crossfire
(2) WD Raptor 36gb raid 0
Win 7 64

At the moment I only play Aion and it runs pretty good except during fort raids where there are alot of players in one area, then it slows to a crawl.(10fps) I would like to get away with spending as little as possible, but make the upgrade worth while. Maybe even just a video card upgrade for now.

Thanks in advance.

 

[MadAdmiral]

I would start saving for a new build. That's an old CPU, and the new ones will require a new board and new RAM. That's probably a good $300-400 upgrade there. A good GPU on top of that would be either the HD 5770 for $160 or the HD 5850 for $300, but those are likely to be handicapped by your CPU then.

 

[henrystrawn]

I agree, I am using the Athlon X2 6400 as a network server after an upgrade from an HP my wife bought a couple years ago. I just bought a XFX HD5770 "egg shape" card and I am very happy with it. Great bang for the buck. The card has a large "orb" cooler, idles at 41c, hits about 62c in Dragon Age Origins at 1920x1080. Although this card will be bottlenecked by CPU I still think he will see the improved grahics he is looking for. If he has the moderate PSU requred, I think he could upgrade in stages, and be happy with the immediate results. The 5770 scored 1538 vs 990 in Unigine Heaven v1.0 Benchmark compared to the overclocked 9800 GT 1 GB I upgraded from.