Worth the upgrade?

[Com807877]

Hi all,

I am thinking about upgrading my current system. As a general rule I like to upgrade when the "next big thing" hits the market (so you won't find me going buying an Athlon XP 1900 and then the next month an XP 2000) so now and in the near future seems to be the right time.

The system is generally used for gaming with the latest releases, and a great deal of non-demanding work. (e-mail, office, etc.)

My current system is an Athlon XP 2000, 512MB DDR266, Nforce 2, with a Radeon 9700 non-pro. Everything is at default clocks.

I am considering getting an Athlon 64 2800 or 3000 on an Nforce 250GB board with 512MB DDR400. (I will probably upgrade the video card to one of the next gen ATI or Nvidia cards when they are released.)

So my question is - is the CPU, RAM, and system board upgrade worth it? I've seen the benchmarks, and of course they are faster... but I'm curious if this is an upgrade that would make you sit down and say "Wow! I should have done this earlier!" ?

Thanks for any advice.

 

[airfoil]

Unless you find a lag with the games you play (no pun intended!) it doesnt look to me like an upgrade is worth your while at this time. As a rule of thumb, I'd say get a PC that is at least twice as fast as your current rig and this means buying even the top of the line 64 bit isn't going to cut it.

IMO: You could afford to wait as long as perhaps early 2005 to take the plunge, and dollar for dollar you'll end up with something a lot more powerful.

 

[BFG10K]

You'll see a big difference at times but it'll depend on what settings you run your games at as to how much faster the performance is.

If I were you I'd go for it. I went from a P4 2.666 GHz to a A64 3200+ (9700 Pro system) and I was extremely pleased with the result.

 

[exar333]

I upgraded from a similar platform...and I did notice a nice increase especially playing games...if you play a lot of power-hungry games like UT2004 and Far Cry...you wont be cpu-limited at all...its a nice jump...