Yet another upgrade...

[ibex333]

Well, Christmas is coming and I will have around $200-250 to upgrade my PC. Because of the possible sales and lowered prices I might just have enough...

What would be the "most bang for the buck" upgrade for me, provided I'm mostly a gamer?

Off course the first thing that comes to mind is the video card, but if you look at my sig you'll see that my video card is not too bad, especially when OC'd. At least it seems that way as of now.

One thing that I'm looking at right now is the processor. With the recent price drops on CPUs I might be able to get a good deal. If I'm not mistaking my CPU has less cache than most today's CPUs and it significantly slower. Then again, I don't know how important is that cache for me and if I really should upgrade the CPU. What do you think?

Would more ram do me any good? Last time I checked 2Gb ram was enough for most gamers. I am not planning to use Vista any time soon either. At least not unless I am forced to use it by DX10 only games.

My main goal is to make sure that my PC is able to play any game I throw at it at 1280x1024 on medium-high to high settings for at least another year from now. I never play at higher resolutions nor do I plan to. I'm more of a budget gamer, always looking for sales and price bargains, but I don't settle for mediocrity either.

 

[Nole7]

There are better video cards out there, but the GTS certainly is up there, so no need to change that.
Unless you're running the 64-bit version of XP Pro (which I doubt), more RAM would be useless.
The only thing you can really do is upgrade the CPU, but there's hardly a need to do it. The E6300 isn't low-end and you're getting a very nice overclock out of it.

I'd say save your money and upgrade in a year.

 

[ibex333]

That's Good Advice. Thank you.

 

[Roguestar]

Originally posted by: Nole7
There are better video cards out there, but the GTS certainly is up there, so no need to change that.
Unless you're running the 64-bit version of XP Pro (which I doubt), more RAM would be useless.
The only thing you can really do is upgrade the CPU, but there's hardly a need to do it. The E6300 isn't low-end and you're getting a very nice overclock out of it.

I'd say save your money and upgrade in a year.

Good advice indeed.

You've got a pretty good PC right now (almost the same as mine, and I'm playing Crysis at mid/high and loving it) and a decent overclock out of it too. Save the cash and this time next year the same amount of money will buy you a Q6600 and another 2GB of RAM, I reckon .