How To Best Spend $250 on Upgrading Your Rig

The Makeover

The most expensive components are CPUs and graphics cards, for which you can easily spend $200 or more on either one of those components. However, there are still a lot of AGP cards on the market at a very reasonable price. An ATI 9800 Pro 128 or 256 can be bought for between $130 and $180.

Many game titles have also been forcing the need for more and more RAM. Fortunately the prices for quality RAM are not as expensive as it has been in the past. Currently you can pick up a pair of 512 MB modules of PC3200 with decent timings for less than $90. It makes sense to pick up some modules.

If you look at our graphics charts from last year, you can see where the two video cards place in comparison to their peers. Now the system in the VGA charts is much more powerful than this test bed. However, I chose to look at Doom3 because it is not a CPU dependent game at this level. It was designed to tax the video card's shaders via complex lighting. This is playable on a 9800 with resolutions of 1024x768 or at 800x600 with more features turned on.

In a game like UT2004, the CPU is the next limitation at the extreme high end but you can still see where on the low end of the chart that the video card is the bottleneck. For the $150 upgrade, you can play this game but at higher frame rates.

Again, hard drives will only change the load times between levels, at boot and at the start of a game. The CPU and motherboard are not as cost effective when looking at the entire system. If this were an encoding/decoding or general office productivity upgrade, CPU, RAM, motherboard and hard drives would take precedence over the graphics solution. Who cares how well 3D is rendered when you are not using 3D applications?