Some advice on best upgrade path

[imported_hamlet]

So here is the deal. I am looking at doing a stopgap upgrade before a complete overhaul of my system. My system is of course used for gaming (Half Life 2, baby) and some dev work. My current system:

- Athlon XP 2400 on ECS K75SA
- 1GB (2 x 512) Mushkin DDR 2100
- Radeon 9500 Pro (w/overclock bios)
- 80 GB 7200 RPM 8mb buffer hard drive

Like I said, I want a stop gap measure for 6 months or so when I upgrade everything, thus I want to limit my budget to about $300. ($400 tops)

What would you guys recommend?
My current thought is a either Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB or some flavor of nVidia 5900.

The only other thought I had was to start the major overhaul by buying a Athlon 64 and Nforce 3 motherboard, thus abandoning the idea of getting a PCIe videocard any time soon, and eventually upgrading the memory and video card.

 

[DaveSimmons]

fx5900 is lousy for DX9, including Half-Life 2.

9800 Pro is great for DX9 & HL2, and perfectly acceptable for Doom3 and D3 engine games. It's not really fast enough to use the full 256 MB -- get a 128 MB version (with 256-bit memory path) instead.

It's hard to recommend the 6600GT while the price is still $240 for AGP (all the sub-$200 cards are PCI-E, whch your mobo can't run). At $200 it would be the clear winner.

If you want to spend more, a plain 6800 at $270 might be a better deal than an overpriced 6600GT at $240. This would make the most difference to your gaming right now, and will still be a great card in 6 months.

But for just 6 months, the 9800 Pro is hard to beat and you can probably still sell it then for $80-100.