Upgrade or Rebuild for gaming

[Mr Pants]

Well, I picked up Hellgate and love everything about it except the horrible loading times and framerate issues. Just very very choppy.

Am wondering if I can get away with an upgrade to help with this or if I need to Rebuild.

K8N Neo4 Platinum is the board I am at. With 1g ram. 6600GT video card. I can't get my CPU info atm. Will add later on if it is needed.

I can get more ram easier. But not faster ram. Board caps at 400 I believe. I am sure there are some CPU upgrades, and I would like to grab a 8800GTS if they drop in price here soon.

My main question is. What is gonna help with some of these issues the most? Are long loading screens due to slow CPU and slow ram? And is the slideshow I get to watch that bad because of the Video Card I am running?

Any info on what an upgrade on each would do for me would be great.

 

[InflatableBuddha]

Welcome, Mr. Pants!

In general, your framerates are most affected by your video card. The long load times are because you're running on only 1GB of RAM, which is the minimum for the game. What level of settings are you trying to use? (e.g. low, medium, high).

Your board only supports Socket 939, so unfortunately you're limited to only a couple of dual-core processors, which are a bit pricier than the AM2 versions. You have a PCI-E slot, though, so you should jump on a new video card (8800GT if you can grab it) as you can continue to use that even if you upgrade your mobo in the future. Make sure your PSU is up to snuff. Another 1GB of RAM, even if it's slower, should help tremendously.

Depends on your budget mostly, but I would say the new video card is your first step. If you can get RAM for cheap, you can give that a try in addition to see if it holds you over for a while. If you're still coming up short, then a new mobo, RAM, and CPU is in order.