Good AGP upgrade for a XP-M Nforce 2 system?

[rancherlee]

I currently have a 9600Pro AIW and its showing its age. I have a XP-M running 2360mhz @ 236fsb on a NF7-S v2 and I'm looking to upgrade the video card one more time on this system. I'm looking at the 800X and 850X series from Ati but I'm wondering IF my CPU is going to be THE bottleneck if I go with the topend cards. I haven't found and benchmarks of these cards on "older" systems like mine, 95% of them seem to be benched in A64 machines.

 

[Spacecomber]

I'm running a 6800GT on an Epox NF2 system with Athon XP mobile at 2300MHz. I figure this is about the equivalent of a Pentium 4 3.0 or thereabouts. Yes, my CPU is a bottleneck, but still get decent game play in Battlefield 2, for example, with pretty high settings at 1024x768 resolution. This was what I upgraded for; so, it has worked out well (previously running a Ti4200 at Ti4600 speeds).

The big issue for me was how much to spend on an AGP card, these days, since I know that I will eventually need to upgrade processor and motherboard, which means going to PCI-E, too, and yet another video card at that time. I found the 6800GT as a refurbished model through NewEgg; so, I felt I could justify the upgrade better.

Space

 

[Kogan]

Some games will be highly cpu dependant (like doom3) and you'll be getting a max of 50-60fps, while you'll be going over 100fps in others - half life 2, far cry, etc. But any of these would be great for your system: (ranked somewhat from slowest to fastest)

x800
6600gt
6800le (may be unlockable)
6800 (may be unlockable)
x800 pro
x800 xl
6800gt

I actually got a 6800nu for my old amd xp system, and the cpu was only the bottleneck in some games. If you plan on playing high resoultions with max aa/af, then get the fastest you can afford - your cpu is plenty fast for current games.