What would best benefit my gaming performance?

[dguy6789]

i have the follwing system which is water cooled:

AMD Athlon XP 1700+ @ 2600+
ASUS A7N8X Nforce 2 Ultra 400
512MB PC2700 DDR
Radeon 9000 Pro


I have about 160 bucks to spend and have narrowed the upgrade down to the following 2, which would benefit my gaming better, buying a radeon 9600 pro and overclocking it to over 500mhz core, or buying another gig of pc3200 so that i would have 1.5GB of memory?

So what would benefit my system better?

[funnyperson1]

The 9600Pro.

Your cpu is more than adequate, 512 ram will be good enough for a while, but the 9000Pro is starting to show its age.

[CrazyP]

the vid card will benefit you the most. you already have enough ram for running most games, the only ones that should give you problems are MMORPG like star wars galaxies or the desrt combat mod for BF1942, that mod's latest release seems to use alot more memory than it used to

I have swapped out my 9700 pro between my three systems, a P4 1.8, a 2.26 P4 and a barton 2500 + running at 2.2 ghz and 1.8 ghz just for testing. all of them ran my games fine with the 9700 pro and 4X AA and 8X AF. my 8500 only runs well with no AA or AF.

so I would get the 9600 pro is I were you. maybe upgrade to a gig later by adding another 512. more than a gig is probably overkill

[Deathknight]

There is only certain games that would really require more than 512mb of ram (certainly no more than 1gb!). A new video card would definatly improve performance across the board.

[dguy6789]

ok thanks guys. you replied way faster thern the guys on the memory section hehe, dont know if they even repleid at all yet :)

[Mr.Guvernment]

if you get more ram - make sure it is the same speed as your current - i would not suggets m ixin pc2700 and pc3200 together - can cause issues.


get the vid car d- but there is NO garuntee you will overclock to those speeds so dont get to excited and assume you can.

[Falcon-K]

i would upgrade the video card...i would get the 9600 Pro