Possible Video Card Upgrade Path?

[Hardtarget]

Hey all,

Haven't posted in a bit but whenever I've turned to you guys for help I've always gotten many many good replies, so hopefully today that is the same 🙂

I had originally planned to built a new rig last month as my PVR was dieing and I was going to turn my current machine into a new PVR. Well I managed to fix my current PVR and then I also ended up buying an entire new 5.1 Home Theater and Receiver so I don't really want to spend the coin to get a new top rig at this point, plus Conroe is comming out, and prices will be changing and what not.

Here is my problem, I have a P4 2.4b with a gig of ram and a 9800pro. This is AGP obviously, also I have a Asus P4PE mobo so I can only do AGP 4 and not 8 (although I beleive in real world time there is almost no difference).

My video card is really starting to hold me back, I've noticed there are a few new AGP cards still comming out, do you guys think I can upgrade to anything, and if so will my CPU really bottleneck me or will I still notice big gains? Finally if I can upgrade what card should I upgrade to?

 

[Munky]

I'd look for something like this x800gto:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102608
You probably dont want to spend more than $200 on an agp card, and for that money the good choices are either an Ati x800-series card or a Nvidia 6800-series card. The gto is good because they usually overclock well, and some can be unlocked to 16 pipes. An unlocked and OC'd gto would easily be twice as powerful as a 9800p. Some geforce 6800 cards also can unlock to 16 pipes, so that's another alternative.

 

[Hardtarget]

I don't really want to bother with overclocking, I have a hot case :

for some reason I was under the impression that GTO cards were fairly crappy