As a former UT player I can only tell you that as long as you stick with the old Unreal Engine you're most certainly better off with the CPU than the grafix card, 'cause the Unreal engine was written back in the days where software rendering was quite common, so it doesn't take a big advantage of the latest grafics hardware. If you ask todays benchmarkers, they say for a reason that the Unreal benchmark is more a CPU than a grafics benchmark.
So do yourself a favour and get the faster CPU. And as MrDuck said, it might be worth considering buying the 1500+ and see what you're able to get out of it. There's no need to spend more money than necessary.
BTW, does anyone know when the Palomino core is phased out and the new core starts to sell? (I'm NOT speaking of HAMMER)
P.S. Having a closer look at your setup, you might have to look whether your mainboards supports the palomino core. And it IS worth considering upgrading the board as well, since with DDR instead of SDR RAM you have twice the effective memory bandwith. Otherwise you might find yourself stuck with a fast CPU thats idle half the time due to a slow memory bus.
To JHSCOUGAR14
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HI, If you go for the cpu upgrade, then you should also purchase some PC 2100 DDR Sdram. That way the FSB will be running at a higher frequency, lowering the clock multiplier. When lowering the clock multiplier from 10 to 8, the cpu would go through 8 refresh cycyles rather than 10 when memory only goes through one cycle. If you don't get DDR Sdram when upgrading the cpu, then I wouldn't even worry about upgrading the cpu yet. However, memory is pricy right now. As for a video card upgrade, I'd hold off for a while, unless you want more video out capabilities or the current card is really sluggish, but a GF2 Pro should be ok. >>
You're mistaken in a whole lot of points. I don't think it is good to give advice to other people when you don't know what you're talking about.
1. He should only purchase DDR RAM when he can actually USE it. And theres no way a KT133(A) board supports DDR RAM.
2. The FSB at a family 7 AMD x86 CPU always runs at 100 or 133 MHz (phys.), but also ALWAYS with DDR. Mind you, that is the FrontSide Bus, not the memory bus. Switching to DDR RAM doesn't change the multiplier. And how should it?????
3. Refresh cycles are periodically refreshes to the memory, otherwise it will loose its data. There are NO refresh cycles the CPU is going through.
*shaking head in disbelief*