CPU/Memory Upgrade Help Needed

[mtschirret]

Hi All-

I have an Athlon 64 3200+ (S939) and am going to upgrade to a 3800+ with the recent price drop. I currently have (2) 512MB sticks of DDR 266 RAM, and am considering upgrading to DDR 400 RAM.

I would love to get feedback on the processor upgrade--is it worthwhile if I am doing a lot of gaming? And will the DDR 400 RAM also be a good upgrade? My video card is an eVGA GeForce 6800 GT 256MB (AGP), and the Mobo is an MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum. Since it does not have a PCI Express slot, I won't be upgrading the card, but was also curious as to what kind of performance increases I might get by moving to PCI EXpress.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated...Thank You!

Michael Tschirret

 

[alimoalem]

upgrading the ram to 2 1gb sticks wouldn't be a bad idea but i wouldn't upgrade from a 3200 to 3800. not worth it

 

[essasin]

Id upgrade to 2 gigs of ram and a better video card.

 

[goota]

I was actually having the same dillemma as you kind of. if your going to upgrade your CPU, do it to an X2 or something, where a difference in performance will be extremely noticeable (and awesome ). otherwise if you want an increase, just OC your cpu/ram.

definitely buy new ram, 2 gigs (2x 1gb) is never a bad thing

6800GT is still a very capable card and can play games really well, esp when OC'ed, so at the moment you dont really need to upgrade your graphics card.

unless you want to play games at super super high resolutions with super super high settings, then i would suggest throwing your computer in the garbage and spending 5 grand on a new one.

 

[Bobthelost]

Dual core wont' help gaming noticably, but it will many other things.

A new GPU is the way forwards.