Upgrade dilemma

[Zimdesign]

Last year I bought an Athlon 64 2800+, an Abit KV8 Pro and 1GB of Kingston Value RAM and I decided to stick with my old 9600 Pro thinking I could just upgrade that next. Now that it has started showing its age in games like Battlefield 2 and especially F.E.A.R., I find that my options are rather limited in upgrading my video card if I stick with my AGP motherboard.

Seems like the only worthwhile upgrades from ATI and Nvidia are only older, high-end cards that are still pretty expensive. Anyone else in this situation?

 

[Atheus]

I've still got a 9800 pro which plays HL2 ok, but can't handle F.E.A.R... I'm going to overclock it until it explodes before i upgrade. You should do the same - flash the BIOS if you can, strap a huge copper CPU heatsink on there and go nuts.

 

[theMan]

how much money can you spend on an upgrade? you can get a 6600gt for like $130, and it will play all the latest games at VERY decent settings.

 

[Zimdesign]

Well, I don't have a set budget yet. I will have to save up for this upgrade regardless. I guess I would like to hit the sweet spot for price/performance on my current rig. I wouldn't want to spend $300-400 on a card that will be useless when I upgrade to PCI-Express in a year or two.

 

[theMan]

yeah, then i think the 6600gt will be perfect for you.

 

[Zimdesign]

Definitely sounds interesting. I actually recommended the 6600GT to a friend of mine when he upgraded his video card recently and he has been very satisfied.