What upgrade will give my system a boost?

[ezdriver]

My computer now has the following items:

Athlon XP 2400+ (T-Bred-B)
ASUS A7V266-E (Rev.107)
512MB DDR 2100 Memory
GeForce 4 Ti-4600 Video
Audigy Gamer Sound
WD 40GB 7200 HD
Enermax 350W PSU
Win XP Home

I'm finding that I'm now having to set some games to medium level or set the resolution to less than max. The GF4 has been a great card for me, but would an ATI card give my system the kick-in-the-pants I'm looking for? I was thinking of a 9700 AIW, but they are looking to be a bit scarce these days. Any suggestions?

ez

 

[tallman45]

An 8mb cache hard drive would be a great addition, put your os/apps on it and keep the 40gb for your page file plus data backups

 

[gunbounder]

another stick of 512mb ram... Radeon 9700 would be nice albeit scarce... If you can wait, do so for the prices of some current processors to go down if you can... (CPU upgrade would be last for me) A larger HDD maybe? the Ti4600 is getting dated so i would look into upgrading that within a couple months. Immediate boost would be ram.

 

[Regs]

You have pretty solid system there. I would not waste 250 dollars on a new video card right now. You're in a perfect position to wait on the A64 3000 + NF3 set up or even a KT800. Right now, you're more than fine.

 

[Jeff7181]

Hard drive, most definately. Check out the new Hitachi's... supposed to be faster than WD's Caviar SE's even... as long as you don't mind IBM's track record with the Deathstar models.

 

[Boogak]

If you're strictly looking to improve your gaming performance, I say go for a video card upgrade. Going from a Ti 4400 to my AIW 9700 Pro made a world of difference in my games, in terms of speed and image quality (being able to play at 4x AA / 8x AF all the time is nice!).

 

[dnoyeb]

depends on exactly which features you are turning down. changing resolution I do not believe is hard on the CPU but hard on the graphics card. And forget the harddrive boost, that would improve game start time, but once you are playing you should be all in the RAM. Im running 1GB myself. Maybe bf1942 has some settings that will allow you to tell the game to use more RAM, thus improving your performance. Use the win2k or xp system monitor to see how your resources are peaking or not during game play.