Talk To Me - Dazed & Confused on Upgrade Path...

Hey Guys...

I have been fighting the urge all through the holiday season of wanted to drop more $$$ on what has already taken a chunk out of the bank account. From my sig, you can see my specs, but all the talk of Nforce4 SLI, BTX, Dual-Core, NV48 has got me confused.

I am battling between a) not doing anything, b) doing something small (DVD Burner, Better Keyboard, etc), or c) going all out and getting the latest & greatest of everything.

I play the recent games, and I really do not put that much stock in synthetic benches or increasing frame rates. I have good performance with good eye candy now in Far Cry, HL2, Doom3, NBA Live 2005, Madden 2005, etc, but every now and then, I get the occassional stutter. Not sure if it is because of the CPU (which it shouldn't be), the Mobo (which it may be), or the GPU (which it may be). Anyway, it is these rare moments where I want to go to Plan C and roll with it.

Need some guidance, folks. Let me know your thoughts, perceptions, ideas, projections, etc. Thanks in advance for clearing me out of the puddle of confusion.

I'm pretty close to your rig specs (FX 53 instead)...

I wouldn't do much, unless you've got a lot of money to burn and go SLI with 2 x 6800 Ultras.

There's not much you can do other then that. maybe an Audigy2 ZS for less CPU usage in games, DVD Writer is a good idea as they are dirt cheap nowadays.

You're pretty damn close to bleeding edge, I wouldn't worry until the next "killer app" game engine comes out.

EDIT: I game using a 19" LCD and only need 1280x1024 and don't buy into SLI yet until cards can really take advantage of the PCIe bus. I don't plan on touching SLI for many months.